How much of the painting does a poster cut off?
Paintings were not made to fit 50×70 cm. When a print fills a standard format edge to edge, part of the picture has to go. We measured how much.
The short answer
For a typical artwork, filling a 50×70 cm print edge to edge cuts off about 7.5 percent of the picture (median). For 69% of the 987 works we measured, more than 5 percent goes; for 34%, more than 10 percent; for 7%, more than a fifth. The other common sizes, 30×40, 70×100, A-sizes and the US 18×24 inch, give almost the same result.
Even if you pick, for every single work, the standard format that suits it best, only 37% fit within 1 percent, and 14% still lose more than 5 percent.
Every standard size, compared
| Format (turned to match the work) | Median cut | >5% | >10% | >20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30×40 cm | 7.5% | 66% | 34% | 6% |
| 40×50 cm | 9.1% | 69% | 47% | 7% |
| 50×70 cm | 7.5% | 69% | 34% | 7% |
| 70×100 cm | 7.9% | 68% | 37% | 8% |
| A3 / A2 / A1 | 7.6% | 68% | 35% | 8% |
| 60×90 cm | 10.7% | 70% | 53% | 13% |
| 11×14 in | 8.4% | 66% | 44% | 6% |
| 16×20 in | 9.1% | 69% | 47% | 7% |
| 18×24 in | 7.5% | 66% | 34% | 6% |
| 24×36 in | 10.7% | 70% | 53% | 13% |
Square formats are left out of the table: only 1% of the works are square, and for the rest a square print loses a quarter or more.
What gets lost, work by work
The dark area is what a 50×70 cm print would cut away if it filled the paper; the dashed line is the print.
| Work | Width ÷ height | 30×40 | 50×70 | 70×100 | 18×24 in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) | 1.00 | 25% | 28% | 30% | 25% |
| Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue | 0.98 | 24% | 27% | 29% | 24% |
| Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid | 0.90 | 16% | 20% | 22% | 16% |
| Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance | 0.88 | 15% | 19% | 21% | 15% |
| Georges Seurat, Study of Figures for "La Grande Jatte" | 1.64 | 19% | 14% | 13% | 19% |
| Vincent van Gogh, La Mousmé | 0.82 | 8% | 13% | 14% | 8% |
| Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day | 1.55 | 14% | 10% | 8% | 14% |
| Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight | 0.66 | 13% | 8% | 6% | 13% |
| Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake | 0.66 | 12% | 8% | 6% | 12% |
| Utagawa Hiroshige, Maples at Mama | 0.66 | 12% | 8% | 6% | 12% |
| Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field | 1.31 | 2% | 7% | 9% | 2% |
| Vincent van Gogh, Girl in White | 0.68 | 10% | 5% | 3% | 10% |
| Paul Gauguin, Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful Land) | 0.68 | 10% | 5% | 3% | 10% |
| Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth | 0.71 | 6% | 1% | 1% | 6% |
Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is close to square, so a 50×70 print loses a fifth of it, in strips down both sides: part of the window on the left and of the bare wall on the right. Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue is a near-perfect square; in a 50×70 frame, more than a quarter of the grid disappears, and with it the balance the painting is about.
How to tell before you buy
- Check the edges. Compare the print with the museum’s own image. Missing signatures, cut-off frames of a woodblock print, or a figure suddenly touching the edge are the usual signs.
- Look for a margin. A print that keeps the whole work usually has a thin band of paper on two sides, or sits inside a mount.
- Ask for the proportion. If the shop cannot tell you the work’s width-to-height ratio, it probably has not checked it.
What we do
We never crop an artwork. Each print is fitted inside the paper, so a work whose proportions differ slightly from the format gets a thin paper margin on two sides, and framed prints sit inside a 5 cm mount. We also only offer the sizes that suit a work’s shape.
How we measured
The 987 works are the approved works in our own catalogue of public-domain art: paintings, drawings and prints from the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons. Each scan was trimmed to the image area (no museum border, colour chart or blank paper), and its width-to-height ratio measured. For each format, turned to match the work, we calculated the share of the picture area that falls outside when the print fills the format edge to edge. The catalogue leans towards Japanese prints and French 19th-century art, and it is not a random sample of all art.
The data is free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page: crop-data.json.
Questions
Do posters crop the original painting?
Often, yes. When a print fills a standard format such as 50×70 cm edge to edge, a typical artwork loses about 7.5 percent of its area, and a third of works lose more than 10 percent. A print that keeps a thin paper margin or a mount can show the whole work.
Which poster size fits a painting best?
The one closest to the painting’s width-to-height ratio. Divide the width by the height and compare: 30×40 and 18×24 in are 0.75, 50×70 is 0.71, 70×100 is 0.70, 60×90 and 24×36 in are 0.67, and 40×50 and 16×20 in are 0.80.
Is 50×70 the same shape as 70×100?
Almost. 50×70 is 0.714 and 70×100 is 0.700, so a work that fits one nearly fits the other. 30×40 (0.75) is noticeably squarer.