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), The Open Door, before May 1844
- Object
- Salted paper print from a paper negative; 14.3 × 19.4 cm. Plate VI of The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen and Robert Rosenkranz Gifts, 2005
- Accession
- 2005.100.498
- File
- The museum's own image server, 2983 × 2232 px — the picture, edge to edge
- Crop
- None. The museum's photograph is already cropped to the image
- Printed at
- 35 × 27 cm sheet: image 19.40 × 14.52 cm, original size, 1:1 — 391 dpi available
40 × 30 cm sheet: image 24.25 × 18.15 cm, enlarged 1.25× — 312 dpi
Why this sheet
A broom leaning in a doorway, a lantern on the wall, a bridle beside it, light across the threshold. Nothing happens, and that is the argument: in 1844 a photograph of an ordinary back door was a claim about what pictures could be about. Talbot wrote beside the plate that a photographer often finds, in a chance ray of sunshine or a weathered oak, a subject worth recording — that the eye may see poetry where others see nothing at all.
He arranged the broom, of course. The picture is staged as carefully as any Dutch interior, and it borrows from them openly. But every photograph of a plain thing since descends from this one.
What we measured
The museum's file is the picture and nothing else. We probed the outermost twelve pixels of all four sides and found print values throughout — no paper margin, no mount, no scanning artefact. So there is no crop: the whole file is printed, and the white border on your sheet is ours, not Talbot's.
The file is 1.3365 wide to high; the catalogued 19.4 by 14.3 cm is 1.3566. The one-and-a-half per cent between them has to fall somewhere. We anchor on the catalogued width, as we do throughout the catalogue, which makes the printed image 19.40 × 14.52 cm — about two millimetres taller than the catalogue states. Anchoring on the height instead would make it three millimetres narrower.
Why it stops at 1.25×
At original size the file delivers 391 dpi, well above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. At 1.25× the print still carries 312 dpi. The floor arrives at about 1.27×, so a third size would have to be thin. There are two.
How it measures against the rest
We measure the separation between motif and ground before admitting a work, in ΔE across the Lab colour space. Hokusai's Great Wave comes to 41.6; our threshold is 23. This sheet measures 43.5 over the central area and 42.7 over the whole picture — it sits at the reference, which for a faded salt print is unusual. The sunlit doorway against the dark interior does the work.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1844; Talbot died in 1877. Public domain worldwide.
The photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes this digitisation as open access, and the object returns as public domain from the museum's own collection API. Taken from the museum's own image server.
What we do not claim. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a salted paper print.
Framing this sheet
- 35 × 27 cm sheet
- A 35 × 27 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 14 × 11 in. Margins 7.80 cm each side, 5.80 above, 6.68 below.
- 40 × 30 cm sheet
- A 40 × 30 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 7.88 cm each side, 5.51 above, 6.34 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