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
- 50 × 50 cm sheet
- A 50 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 20 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 5.75 above, 6.62 below.
- 70 × 70 cm sheet
- A 70 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 28 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 8.05 above, 9.26 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 37.03 cm for the small sheet, 58.20 × 52.08 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), Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908. Signed lower right.
- Object
- Oil on fabric, 170 × 189.5 cm
- Held by
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund
- Accession
- 1949.186 (CMA object 126769)
- File
- The museum's own open-access CDN, an uncompressed TIFF of 12,503 × 11,202 px and 420 MB, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The whole file is printed.
- Printed at
- 50 × 50 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 37.63 cm, 0.22× — 756 dpi available
70 × 70 cm sheet: image 58.80 × 52.68 cm, 0.31× — 540 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
A tiger has a buffalo by the throat in the middle of a jungle that never existed. Around them hang banana clusters like lanterns, orange fruit on a thin branch, a fan of blades, and a wall of green built leaf by leaf up to a narrow strip of pale sky. The two animals are almost the smallest thing in the picture.
Rousseau never saw a jungle. He was a Paris customs officer who painted in his free time and never left France; the plants come from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, the animals from an illustrated picture book of wild beasts. The scale is impossible, the botany invented, the light of no particular continent. This is one of the late jungles — 1908, two years before his death — from the run of pictures that had been laughed at for twenty years and were about to be taken seriously by Picasso, Delaunay and everyone after them.
What we measured
The museum catalogues the canvas at 170 × 189.5 cm unframed, a ratio of 1.1147. The file is 12,503 × 11,202 pixels, a ratio of 1.1161 — 0.13 % apart. Expressed as a scale that is 65.98 pixels per centimetre across the width and 65.89 down the height, the same eighth of a per cent. Two axes that agree that closely are the sign of a sound anchor; where they disagree by a per cent or more, the anchor itself is usually wrong. The catalogued width is our anchor here.
Why nothing is cropped
Cleveland photographs its paintings against a neutral ground, so the first job was to find where the canvas ends. We scanned 600 columns of the top and bottom edges and 600 rows of the sides inward, pixel by pixel in the native file, looking for a warm rim of bare canvas against the green of the painting — and reported the result as a distribution rather than an average, because a single deep notch disappears in a mean.
The top edge shows a median of five pixels and at worst twelve; the left edge a median of three and at worst thirty-four; the bottom and right edges essentially nothing. Thirty-four pixels is half a millimetre on a canvas 1.9 metres wide, and at 0.22× it prints at a twentieth of a millimetre. That is well under the one millimetre at which this house will rebuild anything. There is no flat, uniform studio ground on any side — the tell for a backdrop, which on our Mondrian lozenge measured a constant 235 with a spread near zero; here the spread along every edge runs between 10 and 36. So the file is printed whole.
Why the sheets are square
The canvas is 1.116 wide to tall, which is almost square, and nothing in our sheet ladder is that shape. The square sheet is the closest fit: on a 70 × 50 rectangle the side margins would run to nearly twelve centimetres. So both sizes are square, the width binds at our standard 84 % of the sheet, and the vertical margins come out wider than the horizontal ones — 4.00 against 5.75 and 6.62 on the small sheet, 5.60 against 8.05 and 9.26 on the large one. The same decision was made for Rousseau's Equatorial Jungle and for Mondrian's lozenge.
Why the print is so much smaller than the painting
Because the canvas is 1.9 metres wide. At 0.22× and 0.31× these are deep reductions, and they have nothing to do with the file: at our 300 dpi floor it would carry an image 106 cm wide. The paper decides here, not the photograph. On the small sheet the print has 756 dots per inch available to it and we use three hundred, because that is what matte fine art paper resolves.
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. Published before 1930, the American term has long run; first published between 1931 and 1977 without notice or renewal, no American copyright subsisted; never published before 1978, the unpublished-works rule gives life plus seventy with a floor at the end of 2002.
The photograph. The Cleveland Museum of Art releases this object under Creative Commons Zero and publishes the full-resolution file itself. Commercial use is expressly 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 waiver. 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, every pixel of the sheet carries colour and 88 % of that colour is green — the second greenest work in the shop, behind Rousseau's own Equatorial Jungle at 91 % and ahead of Van Gogh's Poet's Garden at 86 %. The warm eighth is the tiger, the orange fruit and the ochre of the banana clusters. There is effectively no blue: the strip of sky is small and pale.
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