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), [Wild Fennel], 1841–42
- Object
- Salted paper print — a photogenic drawing, made without a camera. 18.7 × 22.7 cm, catalogued with corners clipped
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005
- Accession
- 2005.100.260
- File
- The museum's own image server, 3863 × 3214 px
- Crop
- [12, 42, 3812, 3199] in [x0, y0, x1, y1] — 3800 × 3157 px, the sheet
- Printed at
- 40 × 30 cm sheet: image 22.70 × 18.86 cm, original size, 1:1 — 425 dpi available
50 × 40 cm sheet: image 30.65 × 25.47 cm, enlarged 1.35× — 315 dpi
Why this sheet
A frond of fennel laid on sensitised paper and left in the sun. The plant printed itself, filament by filament, at the size it grew. Talbot called the process photogenic drawing, and the reversal it produces — pale where the object lay, dark where the light reached — is the whole invention, because from such a sheet a second can be printed, and from that a third, without end.
Anna Atkins took that idea, swapped the chemistry for Prussian blue and made the first book ever illustrated with photographs. Her subject was algae; Talbot's, here, is an umbellifer. The two hang together remarkably well: the same method, one blue and one brown, a year or two apart.
What we measured
The museum's file is the sheet itself, not an album page. The outermost one to three pixel rows at the right and the bottom are a dark scanning artefact and are cropped away; beyond them the sheet is inset from the file edge by 42 to 89 pixels at the top, 15 to 72 at the bottom, 12 to 84 at the left and 51 to 116 at the right. The larger figures are the clipped corners.
We print the smallest rectangle that certainly contains the whole sheet. It carries up to about a millimetre of the museum's white mount along two edges. Scale is anchored on the catalogued image width of 22.7 cm, which makes the printed rectangle 22.70 × 18.86 cm — up to a millimetre smaller than the original rather than larger.
The corners are cut and they stay. All four corners of Talbot's sheet are cut at an angle, and the mount shows white behind them. That shape is the object. Cropping inward to a clean rectangle would cut into the fennel, and it is the same rule that keeps the broken corners on the Atkins sheets and the octagonal sheet of Two Plant Specimens.
Why it stops at 1.35×
At original size the file delivers 425 dpi across the sheet, well above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. Enlarged 1.35× it still carries 315 dpi. The floor arrives at about 1.42×, so a third size would have to be either thin or invented. There is no third size.
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 44.0 over the central area and 42.8 over the whole of it — the strongest reading of any Talbot we have examined, ahead of Wrack at 29.1, Articles of China at 27.3 and Two Plant Specimens at 22.8. White filaments on a deep brown ground read cleanly across a room.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1841–42; 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. Not a photogram: a photogram is a unique object made in sunlight, and this is not one.
Framing this sheet
- 40 × 30 cm sheet
- A 40 × 30 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 8.65 cm each side, 5.18 above, 5.95 below.
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 9.68 cm each side, 6.77 above, 7.76 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