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 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 3.00 above, 3.45 below.
- 80 × 60 cm sheet
- An 80 × 60 cm frame. Nearest standard 32 × 24 in. Margins 8.46 cm each side, 4.47 above, 5.13 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 × 32.95 cm for the small sheet, 62.49 × 49.80 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), Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910. Signed lower right: Henri Rousseau / 1910.
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 162.5 cm
- Held by
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Hay Whitney Collection
- Accession
- 1982.76.7 (NGA object 61253)
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 41655 × 33278 px — 1.39 gigapixels, the largest file in this catalogue — taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The whole file is printed.
- Printed at
- 50 × 40 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 33.55 cm, 0.26× — 2519 dpi available
80 × 60 cm sheet: image 63.09 × 50.40 cm, 0.39× — 1677 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 when it was painted
Five monkeys in a wall of leaves. One sits on a branch at the centre, black and silver, holding a white water lily as though it had been handed to him; two orange ones swing from a bough at the top right; a fifth, red-brown and almost human, stands on a rock at the front and looks straight out. Across the bottom runs a bank of crimson leaves that grows nowhere on earth.
Rousseau signed and dated the canvas 1910 and died on 2 September of that year, aged sixty-six. It belongs to the last handful of jungles — the pictures that had been laughed at for twenty years and were about to be taken seriously by Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky and everyone who came after them.
He never saw a jungle. Rousseau 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. That is why the scale is impossible, the botany invented and the light of no particular continent — and it is also why the picture is composed like a stage set rather than a view, in flat layers with no horizon and no vanishing point.
What we measured
The museum catalogues the canvas at 129.5 × 162.5 cm, a ratio of 1.2548. The file is 41655 × 33278 pixels, a ratio of 1.2517 — 0.25 % apart. Expressed as a scale that is 256.34 pixels per centimetre across the width and 256.97 down the height, the same quarter 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, as they do on some of our woodblock sheets, the anchor itself is usually wrong. The catalogued width is our anchor here.
Why nothing is cropped
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 174 to 185 with a spread near 9 — that is the painted sky, lightening towards the upper edge. The bottom sits in the mid-eighties with a spread near 8, the painted grass bank. The sides are painted throughout.
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 print is so much smaller than the painting
Because the canvas is 1.62 metres wide. At 0.26× and 0.39× these are the deepest reductions in our paintings line after Monet's Irises, and they have nothing to do with the file, which could carry an image 353 cm wide at our 300 dpi floor — more than twice the original. The paper decides here, not the photograph. The available resolution on the small sheet is 2519 dpi; we print three hundred of them, because that is what matte fine art paper resolves.
The border is measured differently on the two sheets. The picture is 1.252 wide to tall, the sheets are 1.25 and 1.333. On the 50 × 40 sheet the width binds: 84 % of 50 cm is 42.00 cm of image, and the height that follows, 33.55 cm, just fits the allowance. On the 80 × 60 sheet the height binds instead, 84 % of 60 cm is 50.40 cm, and the width follows at 63.09 cm — which is why the large sheet carries 8.46 cm at each side.
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. For the United States what matters is that 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. This canvas stayed in a Berlin private collection until 1950 and is first recorded in public at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951; even on that least favourable reading there is no restored term to run, and on the unpublished reading the statutory floor put the work in the public domain at the end of 2002. The holding museum declares it public domain.
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.
Provenance, stated as the museum states it. The canvas was in the collection of the Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn Bartholdy, passed to his wife Elsa Gräfin Kesselstadt, and was sold in 1950 through the Swiss dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt to John Hay Whitney, who gave it to the National Gallery in 1982. The museum publishes this ownership history and records no restitution claim for this painting. We reproduce its provenance as published and make no claim of our own about it.
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, essentially the whole sheet carries colour and 70 % of that colour is green. The sheet is tagged Green and sits in that collection between Monet's Irises at 71 % and Van Gogh's Pont de Clichy at 75 %. The warm 18 % is the crimson bank across the foreground and the two orange monkeys; the blue 12 % is the sky along the top edge. Both are accents against the green rather than competitors to it — checked by eye, as our rule requires.
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