Édouard Manet – View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle | Giclée Print

Paris from the hill at the Trocadéro, the summer of the great World’s Fair. The exposition halls run along the horizon, a gasworks chimney and the Pont de l’Alma light stand up out of them, and above the right-hand corner Nadar’s balloon Le Géant hangs on its rope. In front of it all, scattered across a green slope: a horseman, women in crinolines, a gardener with a hose, boys, a dog, two soldiers, a woman with a parasol. Nobody looks at anybody else.

The picture Manet left unfinished. He had been refused by the exposition’s official art section, so he built his own pavilion by the Pont de l’Alma and painted the fair from the slope above it. Then he stopped. In June 1867 the news reached Paris that Emperor Maximilian had been shot in Mexico, and Manet turned to that instead. This canvas stayed a sketch — which is exactly why it is worth printing: the figures are set down in a few strokes each, the ground is left thin in places, and you can see a painter thinking.

The gardener. The man watering the flowerbed at the lower left is the only figure in the picture who is working, and one of the few whose face Manet built up at all: bearded, under a straw hat, looking down at his own hands. He has been read as Manet himself, hidden in his own crowd. The canvas proves nothing either way, and we pass it on as a reading rather than a fact — but he is the figure worth looking at closely, and he is the detail shown here.

What you are looking at is the whole canvas. Because the picture was abandoned, it never went into a frame, and the museum photographed it as it is: tacking edges, bare canvas at the margins, the ragged edge where the paint stops. We print that. The thin warm band around the picture is not a border we added — it is the canvas Manet stretched and never covered.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Nasjonalmuseet’s own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 108 × 196 cm — oil on canvas, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.30× original. Image 58.80 × 32.25 cm.
100 × 70 cm / 39.4 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.43× original. Image 84.00 × 46.08 cm.

The file. Oslo photographed this canvas at 140,667 × 77,819 pixels — 10.9 billion of them, by a wide margin the largest source in this catalogue and one of the largest publicly available anywhere. At our 300 dpi floor it would carry a print almost twelve metres wide. Nothing here is limited by the photograph; the paper is the only limit, and the detail on the large sheet is absurd — the hairs of the brush are in it.

On the crop. The museum photographed the unframed canvas against a dark ground. We cut that ground away at the outermost edge of the canvas, so nothing of the object is lost; where the canvas edge runs a few millimetres further in, a sliver of the dark ground stays in the corner rather than a slice of canvas being cut off. Measured natively at seven points along each edge, that sliver is at most one centimetre on the original — three millimetres on the large print.

On the borders. The canvas is nearly twice as wide as it is tall, so on both sheets the width binds at the house 84 % and the margins above and below run deeper than the ones at the side: 5.60 cm at the sides against 8.26 above and 9.49 below on the small sheet, 8.00 against 11.13 and 12.79 on the large one. Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.

Provenance
Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883), View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, 1867. Also known as L’Exposition universelle, Paris 1867.
Oil on canvas, 108 × 196 cm.
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo, The Fine Art Collections. Gift from Nasjonalgalleriets Venner, 1923; inv. no. NG.M.01293.
Sold at the auction after Manet’s death; Auguste Pellerin, Paris; on the Paris market during the First World War; acquired by the Norwegian shipowner Tryggve Sagen; bought by the Friends of the National Gallery and given to the museum in 1923.
Public domain — the museum states «Free use – no known copyright restrictions». Photograph: Nasjonalmuseet / Børre Høstland, published under CC BY.

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

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling. This is the one work in the shop where it is entirely the other way round.