Anna Atkins & Anne Dixon – Osmunda regalis, 1853 | Giclée Print

Osmunda regalis is the royal fern, the largest that grows in Britain — two metres in a wet ditch, given years and no one to dig it up. What lies on this sheet is one frond, laid flat, its leaflets standing apart from one another like a diagram someone drew very slowly.

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 year this was made. The 1850s were the height of what the British called pteridomania — fern fever. Ferns went on wallpaper, on custard cups, on gravestones; parties went out with trowels and came back with the bog emptied. Osmunda regalis was among the species collected close to disappearing in parts of England. This album belongs to that craze and is the harmless end of it: the plant was picked once, printed, and is still here.

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, 1.58× original

At original size the sheet carries the cyanotype as it was made in 1853, at the width the Getty catalogues. Enlarged, the frond 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 1.37 — 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 × 26.60 cm at 1:1: the museum's width, the object's full height.

Provenance
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) and Anne Dixon (1799–1864), Osmunda regalis, British, 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.227.42.
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.