The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 3.49 cm each side, 3.72 above, 4.28 below.
- 50 × 70 cm sheet
- A 50 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 20 × 28 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 7.71 above, 8.87 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 32.42 × 41.40 cm for the small sheet, 41.40 × 52.82 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910), Rendezvous in the Forest, 1889. Signed lower right: Henri Rousseau.
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm
- Held by
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman
- Accession
- 1972.9.20 (NGA object 53138)
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 21382 × 27197 px, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The whole file is printed.
- Printed at
- 40 × 50 cm sheet: image 33.02 × 42.00 cm, 0.45× — 1645 dpi available
50 × 70 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 53.42 cm, 0.58× — 1293 dpi available
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. Nothing enlarged in software. - Made in
- The certified house nearest your address, to one specification: 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, same colour profile, same border geometry.
The picture, and where it went
Two people are kissing in the middle of this canvas and most people do not find them at first. He wears a tricorne hat and a dark braided coat, she a rose gown; a third small figure in green stands a step behind. Everything else — nine tenths of the surface — is a wood of thin trees drawn branch by branch, with a pale sky and one apricot cloud caught in the lattice.
The costumes are not 1889. A tricorne and a wide gown put the couple in the world of the fête galante, the amorous meeting in a park that Watteau and his followers painted for a century — always in the clear foreground, always the subject. Rousseau moves them to the back of the wood and gives the canvas to the trees. What survives of the old subject is its mood; what disappears is its manners.
The provenance opens with a sentence you almost never read in a museum file: a gift from the artist to his baker, Paris, 1889. Rousseau was a Paris customs officer who painted in his free time, with no dealer and no money, and pictures went to the people he owed. The canvas surfaced only decades later, when the Paris dealer Bela Hein sold it in 1931 to Marie and Averell Harriman in New York. It came to Washington as their foundation's gift in 1972.
What we measured
The museum catalogues the canvas at 92 × 73 cm, a ratio of 1.2603. The file is 21382 × 27197 pixels, a ratio of 1.2720. Expressed as a scale, that is 292.90 pixels per centimetre across the width and 295.62 down the height — 0.93 % apart. The catalogued width is our anchor, as everywhere in this catalogue, and nothing was corrected to make the two numbers agree. What the difference records is a stretched canvas and a camera, and we would rather write it down than quietly split it.
Why nothing is cropped
Most paintings arrive with a margin of photographer's backdrop around them, and the first job is to find the edge of the canvas and cut there. Not here. We read twenty-five rows in from the top and bottom and twenty-five columns in from each side, each as a mean and a spread along the whole edge: the top runs 152 to 157 with a spread of 8 to 10, the bottom 60 down to 54 with a spread above 20, the left and right in the eighties with spreads around 60 to 70. Every band on every side carries painted variation.
What is absent is the tell: a flat, even, light ground at the margin, which on our Mondrian lozenge measured a constant 235 with a spread near zero. Rousseau painted to all four edges and the museum photographed the canvas edge to edge, so any crop would remove paint. The file is placed whole on both sheets.
Why the border is measured differently on the two sheets
The picture is 1.272 tall to wide. The small sheet is 1.25 and the large one is 1.40, so the same rule gives two different answers. On the 40 × 50 sheet the height binds: our standard 84 % of the sheet is 42.00 cm of image, and the width follows at 33.02 cm. On the 50 × 70 sheet it cannot — 84 % of 70 cm would be 58.80 cm of image and leave under two centimetres at the sides — so the width binds instead, 84 % of 50 cm is 42.00 cm, and the height follows at 53.42 cm. That is why the large sheet has the deeper margins above and below.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Henri Rousseau died on 2 September 1910. In Switzerland, the EU and the UK the seventy-year term ran out on 1 January 1981. The United States runs on a different rule, but every branch of it leads to the same place here. Rousseau was already in the public domain in France long before 1 January 1996 — the French term was life plus fifty until 1997 and life plus seventy afterwards — so the 1996 restoration statute has nothing to restore. If the canvas was published before 1930, the American term has long run; if first published between 1931 and 1977 without notice or renewal, no American copyright subsisted; if never published before 1978, the unpublished-works rule gives life plus seventy with a floor at the end of 2002. It was in any case exhibited publicly in New York in 1931 and catalogued repeatedly from then on.
The photograph. The National Gallery of Art states on the object page that this object's media is free and in the public domain, under its Open Access policy. Commercial use is permitted, no licence and no fee. The canvas was photographed square on with no stretcher depth showing on any edge, so it is a flat copy of a flat original and no photographer's right arises anywhere we ship, quite apart from the museum's declaration. We name the museum as the source of the file, never as a partner or an endorser.
What we do not claim. This is a giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.
A note on colour
Measured by our own method, 96 % of the sheet carries colour and 63 % of that colour is green. That clears our threshold of 60 % and the sheet is tagged Green — but by the narrowest margin in that collection. Rousseau's own Equatorial Jungle measures 91 %. The difference is the pale sky and its apricot cloud across the upper third, and the brown of the trunks, which read warm. Checked by eye, as our rule requires: the picture does read as green, and the warm share is a band above the trees rather than a second subject competing with the first.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com