Anna Atkins & Anne Dixon – Athyrium molle, 1853 | Giclée Print

Athyrium molle is a soft-leaved lady fern. Anne Dixon pressed it, Anna Atkins printed it, and the sun did the drawing — a white frond standing in Prussian blue, every pinnule separated, no line drawn by hand. The species name at the foot of the sheet is written in Atkins's own hand.

Anna Atkins made her images without a camera. She laid the dried plant on paper coated with iron salts, exposed it to daylight and rinsed it in water. She had done this several thousand times already for Photographs of British Algae (1843–1853), the first book in history illustrated with photographs. This sheet belongs to what came after: Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853, made together with her friend Anne Dixon.

Which copy. The Getty's — the album Anne Dixon gave away the year it was made. The cover is stamped A. D. to H. D. 1853: Anne Dixon to Henry Dixon. It passed to a niece, then in 1932 to the Girls Friendly Society in Paris, and reached the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984. Every leaf was coated, exposed and captioned by hand, so no two copies of the album are alike.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a cyanotype, 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 these are in museums.

Scale
Original sheet: 25.4 × 19.4 cm / 10.0 × 7.6 in — The J. Paul Getty Museum
30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Enlarged, 1.56× original

At original size the sheet carries the cyanotype exactly as it was made in 1853, at the width the Getty catalogues. Enlarged, the frond reads across a room and the paper grain becomes visible — a different picture, and a deliberate one. Both sizes are printed at 300 dpi, the resolution fine art paper resolves.

One honest note on the measurement. The Getty catalogues the image as 25.4 × 19.4 cm, a ratio of 1.31. Measured on the digitisation, the coated blue paper runs to a ratio of 1.39 — it continues roughly a centimetre and a half below the caption, where the catalogued image height stops. We reproduce the blue paper whole, caption included, and anchor the scale on the catalogued width of 19.4 cm. The printed sheet is therefore 19.40 × 26.91 cm at 1:1: the museum's width, the object's full height.

Provenance
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) and Anne Dixon (1799–1864), Athyrium molle, from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853; cyanotype, 25.4 × 19.4 cm.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, object number 84.XO.227.26.
Gift from Anne Dixon to H. D., 1853 (album cover stamped «A. D. to H. D. 1853»); probably Henry Dixon; by descent to Miss Wedderburn; given to the Girls Friendly Society, Paris, 1932; Galerie Octant; Robert Hershkowitz Ltd.; through Daniel Wolf to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.
The work is in the public domain worldwide; the Getty publishes its digitisation under Open Content.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.