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 — the white border already works as one. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 9.85 cm each side, 11.57 cm above, 13.31 cm below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed sheet on every side: 19.70 × 24.52 cm. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Georgia O'Keeffe — Hands and Thimble, 1919
- Object
- Palladium print. Image 24.4 × 19.4 cm, paper 25.1 × 20.3 cm. Unmarked recto; inscribed on the back in pencil: Ch / OK 3 B
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
- Inventory
- 1949.745
- Rights
- CC0 — the museum places the photograph in the public domain
- File
- Art Institute of Chicago, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- The grey backdrop only. The whole sheet of paper is printed, 20.30 × 25.12 cm.
The picture Stieglitz made
Two hands against dark cloth. The upper one gathers a fold of the fabric, a thimble on its middle finger; the lower one opens beneath it, fingers curled. There is no face, no room and no date in the picture, only the gesture of someone sewing.
The hands are Georgia O'Keeffe's. Stieglitz began photographing her in 1917, married her in 1924 and went on until 1937 — some five hundred photographs in all, according to the Art Institute. He did not think her face was enough. Her torso, her feet and above all her hands were, in his view, just as expressive, and each photograph was meant to stand on its own while the whole series made up what he called a composite portrait. This print is from the second year of it.
Palladium gives the warm, brown-black tone and the soft shoulder between light and dark. It sits on the paper rather than in a gloss, and it does not fade. The museum's print is dark: the hands are the only light in it.
One size, at its own size
The Art Institute catalogues the paper at 25.1 × 20.3 cm and serves a file of 2,962 × 3,637 px. Once the backdrop is cut away, 2,918 px remain across the paper: 143.74 px/cm, or 365 dpi at original size. At our floor of 300 dpi the file would reach 24.7 cm, only 1.22× — not a second size worth offering. So there is one sheet, and the photograph is on it at the size Stieglitz printed it.
That sheet is 40 × 50 cm rather than 30 × 40. The smaller sheet would have fitted, but our printer charges more for it than for the larger one, so we stopped offering it. The larger sheet leaves the print a wide white border, which is how photographs of this period were usually shown anyway.
A check on the crop: the dark field in the file measures 1.2375 wide to high, the catalogued paper 1.2365. They agree to within 0.08 %, so what we print is the whole sheet of paper, not just the picture area, which the museum gives as 24.4 × 19.4 cm.
What we measured at the edges
The outer 7 to 22 pixels of the file are the photographer's grey backdrop, reading around 175 on a scale of 255; the print reads 55 to 70 from there inwards. We found the edge on every side, then took the largest rectangle lying wholly inside the print. The left and right edges lean by two pixels over the height of the sheet, about 0.04°. We left that alone.
The tonal range is narrow: from the 2nd to the 98th percentile the print runs from 38 to 100 on a scale of 255, with the median at 60. It is a dark, quiet print, and we would rather say so than brighten it. The giclée keeps the museum's tones.
What we are allowed to sell
Stieglitz died on 13 July 1946, so the photograph has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 2017. In the United States the Art Institute of Chicago publishes it as public domain and releases the image under CC0.
The picture shows Georgia O'Keeffe's hands, not her face. Her name appears here only because it is part of the museum's title for the work. We do not use it as a label or a brand, and nothing about this sheet is endorsed by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum or Foundation. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States.