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 13.63 cm each side, 5.85 cm above and below.
- 40 × 60 cm sheet
- A 40 × 60 cm frame. Nearest standard 16 × 24 in. Margins 11.08 cm each side, 3.20 cm above and below.
- If you mat it
- Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 12.15 × 37.70 cm for the small sheet, 17.24 × 53.00 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
A narrow picture on a standard sheet
An ōtanzaku is 38 cm high and 13 wide — a shape no frame shop stocks. We print it centred on a normal sheet and let the side margins run wide. That is what a mat would do anyway, and it means the print goes into an off-the-shelf 16 × 20 or 16 × 24 inch frame without a custom cut. The same solution carries the three Hiroshige bird-and-flower panels in this catalogue.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Fuyu Sumidagawa no yuki (Winter: Snow on the Sumida River), from the series «Shiki Edo meisho» (Famous Places of Edo in the Four Seasons), 1833–38
- Object
- Colour woodcut, 38.3 × 12.6 cm — a black key block with colour blocks
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Purchased in 1956 with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences
- Inventory
- RP-P-1956-771
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, native 2764 × 6666 px
- Crop
- The mount board around the sheet removed at the measured sheet edge; nothing inside the sheet touched.
What is in the picture
A man poles a bamboo raft downstream while the snow falls. The reeds along the near bank stand capped in white, the far bank is a low white line, and a snow-laden bough hangs across the upper half of the sheet. In the top left corner is a poem, cut into the block with the picture. The Rijksmuseum catalogue records the subject plainly: snow landscape, man on a raft in the river during snowfall, a poem upper left.
What we measured
Unlike most files in our Japanese line, this one is not trimmed to the sheet: the museum photographed the print on a cream mount board of almost the same tone as the paper. A luminance threshold therefore does not find the edge. We took the column and row means over the picture instead and located the four edges at the steepest change: left 341, right 2469, top 157, bottom 6551. That is 2129 × 6395 pixels out of a file of 2764 × 6666.
Its ratio is 3.0042 against 3.0397 for the catalogued dimensions, 1.2 % apart — what a hand-trimmed Japanese sheet does. The anchor is the catalogued sheet height, as everywhere in our Japanese line: 38.3 cm over 6395 pixels is 166.97 px/cm, which is 424 dpi at original size. Across the width that yields a printed 12.75 cm against the catalogued 12.6. We do not stretch the file to make the two axes agree.
Why the larger sheet stops at 1.40×
At our 300 dpi floor the file carries 54.15 cm of picture height, an enlargement of 1.414×. The 40 × 60 cm sheet uses 53.60 cm of that, at 303 dpi. A 50 × 70 cm sheet would need either more resolution than the file has or side margins of about 16 cm, which is more white than picture. So this sheet stops at 40 × 60 — the file sets the limit, not the price list.
What we are allowed to sell
Hiroshige died in 1858 and the sheet was published in the 1830s. It is in the public domain everywhere we ship. The Rijksmuseum publishes the object under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0, serves the full-resolution file openly and asserts no separate right in its photograph.
A note on colour
The blue of the water and the grey of the sky are the colours the museum's file carries, and we keep them: no correction, no cleaning, no removal of the age in the paper. What the block printed and what the paper has become in nearly two centuries both stay in the print.