Anna Atkins – Dictyota dichotoma, 1853 | Framed Giclée Print

Anna Atkins made this image without a camera. She laid a piece of dried seaweed on paper coated with iron salts, put it in the sun, and rinsed it in water. What the plant covered stayed white. Everything else turned Prussian blue.

She did this several thousand times. Between 1843 and 1853 she produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions — the first book in history illustrated with photographs, published eight months before Talbot's Pencil of Nature. Perhaps twenty-five copies were ever assembled, each plate printed by hand, each caption written by hand.

She was a botanist, not an artist, and the intention was documentary: a visual key to species that line engraving rendered badly. The result is something else. A brown-branched alga on white paper is a specimen. The same alga as a white silhouette on deep blue is a drawing made by the plant itself.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of one of Atkins's cyanotypes, printed with pigment inks. It is not a cyanotype and is not sold as one — a real cyanotype is a unique object made in sunlight, and Atkins's are in museums.

Scale
Original: 25.3 × 20 cm / 10.0 × 7.9 in — Metropolitan Museum of Art
30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1

At original size the sheet carries the cyanotype exactly as Atkins made it.

The plate is reproduced whole, including Atkins's handwritten species name. Only the museum's mount around the sheet is trimmed away.

Provenance
Anna Atkins (1799–1871), Dictyota dichotoma, from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843–1853; cyanotype, image 25.3 × 20 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005, Acc. No. 2005.100.557 (18).
The work is in the public domain worldwide; the Museum publishes its digitisation under Open Access (CC0).

The frame
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, white border. Slim black aluminium frame, glazed with clear plexiglass instead of glass, so it travels safely. Print and frame ship together in one package and are assembled on arrival. Part of the Hotel Collection — volume pricing from ten pieces.