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), A Scene in a Library, before 22 March 1844
- Object
- Salted paper print from a paper negative; image 13.3 × 18 cm. Plate VIII of The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
- Accession
- 2005.100.172
- File
- The museum's own image server, 3283 × 2701 px — the whole sensitised sheet on a white mount
- Crop
- [40, 44, 3273, 2681] in [x0, y0, x1, y1] — 3234 × 2638 px, the sheet
- Printed at
- 40 × 30 cm sheet: 23.75 × 19.37 cm, original size, 1:1 — 346 dpi available
Why this sheet
Two shelves of books, photographed in daylight in 1844. It is one of the plates Talbot chose for The Pencil of Nature, and beside it he wrote about invisible rays — the thought that a camera might one day record what the eye cannot see. The picture itself is quiet to the point of stubbornness: no people, no event, just spines and gilding and the light of a spring afternoon.
The condition is the reason we sell this one. Salt prints fade, and most surviving copies of this plate are pale and flat. We measured another institution's copy in August 2026 — a tonal span of 76 at a median of 207 — and turned it down as too weak to print. The Metropolitan Museum's copy measures 131 at a median of 93: deep brown, almost black in the ground, the books standing out of it. Same picture, a different object.
What we measured
Talbot sensitised a piece of writing paper larger than his negative, so the paper around the picture went dark in the light as well. That dark field is part of the object, and its outer edges are where he cut the sheet by hand — not straight. We print the smallest rectangle that contains the whole sheet, which means the museum's white mount shows in the notches along the edges. Same rule as the irregular trim of Wrack and the broken corners on the Atkins sheets.
The catalogue measures the picture, not the sheet, so the picture had to be found inside the file. Its faint border sits at 2451 × 1812 pixels — a ratio of 1.353, which is exactly the catalogued 18 by 13.3 cm. That gives 136.2 pixels per centimetre and 346 dpi at original size, and it makes the reproduced sheet 23.75 × 19.37 cm.
Why only one size
At original size the file delivers 346 dpi, above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. It does not deliver much more. At 300 dpi the sheet could grow to 27.4 cm wide — 1.15×, which is not an enlargement anyone should pay for. So this sheet is offered at 1:1 and nowhere else.
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 24.8 over the central area — above the threshold but not by much, which is what a photograph of brown books on brown paper looks like as a number. Measured as the lit spines against the ground it reaches 37.2. It is a dark, quiet print, and we would rather say so.
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
- 40 × 30 cm sheet
- A 40 × 30 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 8.13 cm each side, 4.94 above, 5.68 below.
- If you mat it
- Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed rectangle 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