Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Utagawa Hiroshige – Wild Duck in Snow, 1830s | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, A Wild Duck Swimming by a Snow-covered Bank beneath Snow-laden Reeds, 1830s — the tall ōtanzaku sheet reproduced whole
  • Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at the size printed on the 50 × 70 sheet: the duck's head and beak, the snow left as bare paper on the dark water
  • Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, A Wild Duck Swimming by a Snow-covered Bank beneath Snow-laden Reeds, 1830s — the tall ōtanzaku sheet reproduced whole
  • Hiroshige's Wild Duck in Snow as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at the size printed on the 50 × 70 sheet: the duck's head and beak, the snow left as bare paper on the dark water
Utagawa Hiroshige – Wild Duck in Snow, 1830s | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Wild Duck in Snow, 1830s | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A wild duck swims along a snow-covered bank. Above it the reeds bend under their own load of snow; below, the water is a deep, even blue with white flakes falling across it. The bird is the only warm thing in the picture — buff and brown against the cold — and it is drawn with the economy of someone who had watched ducks for a long time.

The format is ōtanzaku, a tall narrow panel of about 38 by 17 centimetres, the shape used for poem-slips and for pictures hung in the narrow space between two posts. The snow is not painted on: it is the bare paper, left unprinted, with the blue laid around it.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike. This one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, from the Clarence Buckingham Collection — the blue of the water is still deep and evenly graded, and the reeds have kept their fine line.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one — a woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums.

Scale
Original: 38.2 × 17 cm / 15.0 × 6.7 in — ōtanzaku, Art Institute of Chicago
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 16.63 × 37.35 cm.
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — enlarged, 1.7× original. Image 27.61 × 62.00 cm.

A narrow picture on a standard sheet. A panel of this shape has no standard frame of its own. The sheet sizes that would fit it tightly mean a made-to-measure frame and made-to-measure glass, so the picture is centred on our normal sheets instead, with the side borders wider than the top and bottom. That is how a narrow picture is matted anyway, and it means you can frame this one in a 16 × 20 or 20 × 28 inch frame bought off the shelf.

The sheet is reproduced whole, including the poem and the signature. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), A Wild Duck Swimming by a Snow-covered Bank beneath Snow-laden Reeds, 1830s; colour woodblock print, ōtanzaku, 38.2 × 17 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, Acc. No. 1952.338.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation under CC0.

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.

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