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), Wrack, 1839
- Object
- Salted paper print — a photogram, made without a camera. 22 × 17.5 cm, catalogued as irregularly trimmed
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936
- Accession
- 36.37 (25)
- File
- The museum's own image server, 3008 × 3801 px — the whole album leaf
- Crop
- [358, 211, 2704, 3157] in [x0, y0, x1, y1] — the salt print alone, 2346 × 2946 px
- Printed at
- 30 × 40 cm sheet: image 17.50 × 22.00 cm, original size, 1:1 — 341 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. Silver salts brushed onto writing paper, a frond of seaweed laid on top, sunlight, then a bath to arrest it. The result is reversed — pale where the plant lay, dark where the light reached the paper — and that reversal is the invention: from a sheet like this a second can be printed, and from that a third, without end.
Four years later Anna Atkins took the same idea, swapped the chemistry for Prussian blue, and made the first book ever illustrated with photographs. Her subject was British algae. Talbot got there first, in sepia, and the two sheets hang together remarkably well — the same plant family, the same method, one blue and one brown, four years and a whole aesthetic apart.
What we measured
The museum's file is the entire album leaf: cream paper, the red binding down the right-hand side, and a pencilled caption — Fuco — written on the mount below the print. We print the salt print alone. The caption belongs to whoever assembled the album, not to Talbot's sheet, and reproducing it would mean selling a photograph of a page rather than the work.
The print measures 2346 × 2946 pixels in that file. Against the catalogued 17.5 × 22 cm that is 134.1 and 133.9 pixels per centimetre — agreement to two parts in a thousand, which tells us the catalogue and the file describe the same rectangle.
The trim is irregular and it stays. Talbot cut this sheet by hand and did not cut it square: a long curve at the upper left, angled corners, a stepped lower edge. We print the rectangle that contains it, so cream album paper shows around those cuts — about an eighth of the printed area. Cropping inward to a clean rectangle would cut into the seaweed. Same rule as the broken corners on the Atkins sheets.
Why only one size
At original size the file delivers 341 dpi across the print, above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. It does not deliver more. At 300 dpi the image could grow to 19.9 cm wide — 1.14×, which is not an enlargement anyone should pay for. So this sheet is offered at 1:1 and nowhere else, the same decision that leaves Monet's late Irises at a single 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 29.1 — the strongest of the three Talbot photographs we built in September 2026, ahead of Articles of China at 27.3 and Two Plant Specimens at 22.8. Pale filaments on a deep brown ground read cleanly at a distance.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1839; 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
- 30 × 40 cm sheet
- A 30 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 6.25 cm each side, 8.37 above, 9.63 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