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
- 30 × 40 cm sheet
- A 30 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 12 × 16 in. Margins 2.35 cm each side, 2.20 cm above and below.
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 4.51 cm each side, 3.20 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: 24.70 × 35.00 cm for the small sheet, 30.39 × 43.00 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Utagawa Kunisada I (1786–1865) and Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826–1869), Sumida River in Winter, from the series «Tōto shiki meisho tsukushi» (Famous Places of the Eastern Capital in the Four Seasons), 1862
- Object
- Colour woodcut, 35.6 × 24.9 cm; block cutter Koizumi hori Sen, publisher Uoya Eikichi
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. H. C. Bos bequest, Rotterdam, 2008
- Inventory
- RP-P-2008-154
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, at high resolution
- Crop
- The white photographic ground removed at the measured sheet edge; nothing inside the sheet touched.
Two hands, one sheet
The figure is by Kunisada, the most sought-after portraitist of the late Edo period and by 1862 a man in his seventies. The landscape in the fan-shaped opening is by Hiroshige II, who had taken over the name and the studio of the Hiroshige everyone knows. The series is built on that division: the figure carries the season, the cartouche carries the place. Here the place is the Sumida, the river that runs through Edo, and the season is written as falling snow — flakes over the water, the bank white under bare trees, a roof among them, and a single boat being poled across.
The man below looks up towards it, a long-stemmed pipe in his left hand, his robe patterned and his collar padded. Behind him the ground is a deep, flat blue. This sheet and Takanawa in Winter come from the same series and the same year and were made to hang together.
What we measured
The museum photographs the sheet on a white ground. We found the sheet edge row by row and column by column at the first value below 236 and took the median: left 73, right 4346, top 114, bottom 6127. That is 4274 × 6014 pixels out of a file of 4410 × 6238.
The anchor is the catalogued sheet height, as everywhere in our Japanese line: 35.6 cm over 6014 pixels is 168.94 px/cm, which is 429 dpi at original size. Across the width that yields a printed 25.30 cm against the catalogued 24.9 — 1.6 % apart. A Japanese sheet was trimmed by hand and the two axes rarely agree to the last millimetre. We do not stretch the file to make them.
Why the larger sheet is bound by its height
Our house rule leaves 8 % of the sheet width as a margin. This picture is tall — 1.41 high to wide — so on the 40 × 50 cm sheet the height runs out before the width does, and the margin is measured top and bottom instead. The image comes to 30.99 × 43.60 cm, an enlargement of 1.22×, at 350 dpi. Above that the file would fall below our 300 dpi floor.
What we are allowed to sell
Kunisada died in 1865, Hiroshige II in 1869, and the sheet was published in 1862. 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 deep blue behind the figure is the colour the museum's file carries, and we keep it: no correction, no cleaning, no removal of the age in the paper. What the block printed and what the paper has become in 160 years both stay in the print.