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.
The sheet you have
- Work
- William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), Articles of China, 1843–44 — Plate III of The Pencil of Nature
- Object
- Salted paper print from a paper negative. Image 13.7 × 18.2 cm; the sheet it sits on measures 18.7 × 22.4 cm
- Held by
- The Art Institute of Chicago
- Accession
- 2015.74
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 8272 × 6809 px
- Crop
- None. The digitisation is already cropped to the printed picture — see below
- Printed at
- 35 × 27 cm sheet: image 18.20 × 14.98 cm, original size, 1:1 — 1154 dpi available
50 × 40 cm sheet: image 38.22 × 31.46 cm, 2.1× — 550 dpi available
Why this plate
The Pencil of Nature, issued in six parts between 1844 and 1846, is the first book illustrated with photographs. The text Talbot printed beside this plate is not about beauty: he suggests that a collector photograph his china, and that should a thief ever take it, «the mute testimony of the picture» could be produced in court. It is the first argument anyone made for photography as evidence rather than as a picture, and the man making it had invented the negative a few years earlier.
Of the Talbot sheets we examined, this is also the one the digitisation serves best. Chicago's file carries 1154 dpi at original size — four times what most of their Talbot holdings offer, which are capped at 3000 pixels on the long side and permit no enlargement at all.
What we measured, and where this sheet ends
The museum's photograph is cropped to the picture itself. Measured across the whole file, every edge reads as printed ground; there is no bare paper anywhere in it. So the roughly two centimetres of sheet that surround the print on the object are not in the digitisation, and therefore not in your print. What you get is the photograph whole — the cabinet with its rounded corners and the dark ground on all four sides.
Our file runs to a ratio of 1.2154 against the catalogued 18.2 / 13.7 = 1.3285, so it holds a little more height than the catalogued rectangle. We anchor the scale on the catalogued width of 18.2 cm and reproduce what the file holds: 18.20 × 14.98 cm at 1:1.
The cloudy mottling at the upper left is where the sensitising went on unevenly, and the outer edges of the print are darker than its middle. Both are on the object. Nothing is retouched and nothing is trimmed inward.
Why it stops at 2.1×
At 300 dpi this file would carry an image 70 cm wide. We do not print it that large. Our ceiling for photographs and photograms is 2.1× the size of the original, and here that stops the enlargement at 38.22 cm. It is the first Talbot sheet in this catalogue where the limit is the work rather than the file.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1843–44; Talbot died in 1877. Public domain worldwide.
The photograph. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes this digitisation as open access under CC0, from the museum's own IIIF endpoint.
What we do not claim. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. Not a salt print: a salt print is a contact print made in sunlight from a paper negative, and this is not one.
Framing this sheet
- 35 × 27 cm sheet
- A 35 × 27 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 14 × 11 in. Margins 8.40 cm each side, 5.59 above, 6.43 below.
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 5.89 cm each side, 3.97 above, 4.57 below.
- If you mat it
- Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side. Do not trim the sheet.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com