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 2.49 cm each side, 2.20 cm above and below.
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 4.70 cm each side, 3.23 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: 24.42 × 35.00 cm for the small sheet, 30.00 × 42.95 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), Takanawa 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 × 25.3 cm; block cutter Koizumi hori Sen, publisher Uoya Eikichi
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. H. C. Bos bequest, Rotterdam, 2008
- Inventory
- RP-P-2008-155
- 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 season is winter and the place is Takanawa, the shore south of Edo where the highway ran along the bay — snow on the roofs of the post station, the water grey-blue and crowded with masts, the far bank a thin pink line.
The woman raises a hand to her brow against the light. Her coat is printed with a wave pattern, her hair is tied under a blue cloth, and the padded collar is the winter of the title as much as the snow above her.
What we measured
The museum photographs the sheet on a white ground, mean luminance about 248. We found the sheet edge row by row and column by column at the first value below 236 and took the median: left 69, right 4195, top 106, bottom 5978. That is 4127 × 5873 pixels out of a file of 4290 × 6066.
The anchor is the catalogued sheet height, as everywhere in our Japanese line: 35.6 cm over 5873 pixels is 164.97 px/cm, which is 419 dpi at original size. Across the width that yields a printed 25.02 cm against the catalogued 25.3 — 1.1 % 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 — 1.42 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 30.60 × 43.55 cm, an enlargement of 1.22×, at 343 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 cold violet-blue of the bay is the colour the museum’s file carries, and we keep it: no correction, no warming, no attempt to make it look like an older print. Which pigment the block was inked with in 1862 we do not claim to know.