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), Two Plant Specimens, 1839
- Object
- Photogenic drawing — a photogram, made without a camera. Image and paper 22.1 × 18.1 cm; laid on a mount of 29 × 21.5 cm. The sheet is an octagon: all four corners trimmed
- Held by
- The Art Institute of Chicago — Edward E. Ayer Endowment in memory of Charles L. Hutchinson
- Accession
- 1972.325
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 5772 × 7039 px
- Crop
- None. The digitisation is already the bounding box of the sheet — see below
- Printed at
- 30 × 40 cm sheet: image 18.10 × 22.10 cm, original size, 1:1 — 810 dpi available
40 × 50 cm sheet: image 31.68 × 38.68 cm, 1.75× — 463 dpi available
Why this sheet
1839 is the year photography was announced, and this is one of the things Talbot had to show for it. He called the process photogenic drawing: silver salts brushed onto writing paper, an object laid on top, sunlight, then a bath to arrest it. The result is reversed — pale where the object lay, dark where the light reached the paper — and that reversal is the invention. From a sheet like this one a second sheet can be printed, and from that a third, without end. It looks like a botanical specimen. It is the negative principle, four years before there was a settled word for it.
Of the Talbot sheets in Chicago's collection, this is one of only two whose digitisation carries a real enlargement. Most of their Talbot holdings are capped at 3000 pixels on the long side and permit none at all.
What we measured, and where this sheet ends
The sheet is an octagon. Talbot trimmed the paper across all four corners, and in those corner triangles the museum's cream mount shows through. We reproduce the rectangle that contains the object, corners and all, because cropping inward to a clean rectangle would cost about a centimetre of the picture on every side — the same inward trim we refuse on the broken Atkins corners.
Along the four straight edges the picture runs flush with the file boundary. Measured in ten bands per edge, the mount appears only in bands one and ten — the corners — and nowhere between them. So the very edge of Talbot's paper is not in the digitisation, and therefore not in your print. What is missing is the last hair's breadth of the border; the photogram itself is complete.
The file checks out against the catalogue to one part in a thousand: 5772 pixels across 18.1 cm and 7039 down 22.1 cm give 318.9 and 318.5 pixels per centimetre. We anchor on the catalogued width.
Condition, printed as it is: a patch of foxing at the upper left, fading that runs darker towards the edges, cloudy mottling across the ground, and a line of faint handwriting at the top right. Nothing is retouched and nothing is colour-corrected.
It is a quiet sheet
We measure the separation between motif and ground before admitting a work, in ΔE across the Lab colour space. Hokusai's Great Wave, the loudest thing we sell, comes to 41.6; our threshold is 23. This sheet measures 22.7 over the area where the plants are, and 18.9 taken over the whole surface. It sits at the threshold, not above it.
The softness is in the object, not in the scan — the file is sharp under magnification. Pale plants on a rose-brown ground that has been fading since 1839 is simply what this thing looks like. We print it that way, and we would rather you knew before it arrived.
Why it stops at 1.75×
Our ceiling for photographs and photograms is 2.1× the size of the original. That is not what stops this one. At 2.1× the image would be 38 cm wide on a 40 cm sheet, leaving a one-centimetre border, which is not a border. The enlargement stops at 1.75× so that 4.16 cm of white remains at the sides. At 300 dpi the file would carry an image 48.9 cm wide; the sheet runs out long before the resolution does.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1839; Talbot died in 1877. Public domain worldwide.
The photograph. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes this digitisation as open access under the CC0 Public Domain Designation, from the museum's own IIIF endpoint.
What we do not claim. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. Not a photogram: a photogram is a unique object made in sunlight, and this is not one.
Framing this sheet
- 30 × 40 cm sheet
- A 30 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 5.94 cm each side, 8.32 above, 9.58 below.
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.16 cm each side, 5.27 above, 6.06 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