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
- 35 × 27 cm sheet
- A 35 × 27 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 14 × 11 in. Margins 3.55 cm each side, 2.48 cm above and below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 27.30 × 21.43 cm. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Charles T. Scowen & Co. (British studio in Ceylon, active 1870s–1890s), Two Christmas orchids, Sri Lanka, 1876–93
- Object
- Albumen print, 22.1 × 27.9 cm, from an album of fifty photographs
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Inventory
- RP-F-F01197-AS
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, at high resolution
- Crop
- The album mount removed at the measured edge of the print; nothing inside the photograph touched.
The flower, and why it is called a Christmas orchid
Cattleya trianae grows in the Andes of Colombia and flowers in December and January, which is how it got its English name. It is Colombia's national flower. This one was not photographed in Colombia but in Ceylon, where Charles T. Scowen ran a commercial studio in the 1870s and 1880s selling albums of views, people and plants to travellers and residents. The species name is written into the negative at the foot of the print and the studio credit sits in the lower left corner; both are part of the photograph, not added by us.
What we cropped, and how we found the edge
The museum's file is the album leaf, not the print. Read as column and row means across the middle of the image, the first seventy pixels on every side hold a steady mount tone of about 57; then comes a narrow shadow groove at about 42, and then the bright edge of the print itself — 83 to 96 on the left, 67 on the right, 74 at the top, 61 at the bottom. The photograph therefore runs from x 83, y 74 to x 3800, y 3009: 3718 × 2936 pixels of a file of 3880 × 3066.
We print exactly that rectangle. The dark ground of the photograph is the photograph's own, and it stays; what we removed is the grey card it was pasted to.
Why there is only one size
The catalogued width, 27.9 cm, is the anchor: 3718 pixels over 27.9 cm is 133.3 px/cm, which is 338 dpi at original size. Measured down the height it is 132.9 — 0.31 % apart, which is what a hand-trimmed albumen print on a mount does.
Our floor is 300 dpi. That would allow an image 31.5 cm wide, an enlargement of 1.13×. Thirteen per cent more picture is not a second product, so there isn't one. The sheet you have prints the photograph at the size it was made: 27.90 × 22.03 cm.
What we are allowed to sell
The Rijksmuseum publishes this object under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 and serves the full-resolution file openly, with no cap and no separate claim in its photograph of the print. The photograph itself dates from between 1876 and 1893 and was published long before 1930; the term has expired in the United States, and in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom it has expired for a work of this date whichever author is assumed.
A note on tone, and one on hanging it
An albumen print is not black and white but brown and cream, and this one is printed dark. On paper it reads as a warm near-black with the flowers standing out of it. We keep the museum's colour and do not neutralise it.
It wants a dark or dim wall rather than a bright one. Against white the ground goes flat; against a deeper colour the petals do what the photographer meant them to do.