Anna Atkins & Anne Dixon – Onoclea sensibilis, 1853 | Giclée Print

Onoclea sensibilis is called the sensitive fern because it dies at the first touch of frost — not gradually, overnight. This one was picked in New Jersey while it was still whole, pressed flat, and carried across the Atlantic in an envelope. The single white frond on this sheet is what light made of it in an English garden in 1853.

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. What the plant covered stayed white; everything else turned Prussian blue. She had already done this several thousand times for Photographs of British Algae (1843–1853), the first book in history illustrated with photographs. This sheet comes from what followed: Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853, made with her friend Anne Dixon.

The shape. Most ferns in the album print as lace. This one prints as a single broad blade with deep rounded lobes and a stalk that curves like a drawn line — nearer to an oak leaf than to a fern, and one of the few plates in the album that reads as one form rather than a texture.

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, 1.59× original

At original size the sheet carries the cyanotype as it was made in 1853, at the width the Getty catalogues. Enlarged, the frond becomes a single white shape that reads across a room, and the grain of the coated paper 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 1.36 — it continues 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 × 26.35 cm at 1:1: the museum's width, the object's full height.

Provenance
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) and Anne Dixon (1799–1864), Onoclea sensibilis, New Jersey, 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.227.53.
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.