Drag the print to move it. The painting is shown at true scale; where its shape differs from the sheet the print has a paper border, not drawn here. Prints are sold unframed, and a frame here is only for planning.
The Holy Family on the Steps
1648 · oil on canvas · The Cleveland Museum of Art
For the Holy Family
Sizes
image 10×6.9 in on a 10×8 in sheet
The museum’s file supports 18×24 in at 250 dpi; a larger sheet would fall below our floor.
What is dpi?
Dots per inch: how many pixels of the museum’s file go into each inch of paper. Our floor is 240 for sheets up to 20 inches, 180 up to 36 inches and 120 beyond, because a larger print is seen from further away. We never offer a sheet below the floor, and the number on each size is the one you receive.
Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308 gsm cotton rag · pigment inks · printed to order
Printed to order · the whole painting, never cropped · if it arrives damaged, we replace it
Free shipping, included in the price, to all eight countries we ship to. Dispatched in 2–4 working days — nothing to send back if it arrives damaged.
Send as a gift
A printed card goes in the parcel with your message and the work’s museum record. No price is shown anywhere in the parcel. Enter the recipient’s address at checkout.
0 / 240Have a gift certificate?
The certificate’s balance is applied at checkout; any remainder is paid there. Check a balance or buy one.
Christmas: order by Monday 7 December for delivery in the United States before Christmas.
All editionsAbout this painting
Our Lady sits halfway up a flight of stone steps with the Christ Child seated on her knee, and Smarthistory finds her head at the apex of a pyramid of figures. Cleveland reads that geometry as the argument itself: the Holy Family's place in the redemption. The young John the Baptist offers an apple, the fruit of the Fall, and Christ reaches for it, which the museum reads as a foreshadowing of the Passion; Saint Elizabeth's gesture, it says, foretells the same. Saint Joseph sits apart in shadow, his compass, as Smarthistory reads it, both a tool of his trade and a sign of God the Father, and the steps themselves, in the same reading, recall the Virgin as stairway to heaven. Poussin painted it in 1648 for a private patron, Hennequin de Fresne, and studied the light with wax models in a box pierced with holes. The light still lies across her knees.
Sources: Smarthistory, Nicolas Poussin, Holy Family on the Steps · The Cleveland Museum of Art, object record 1981.18 · The Cleveland Museum of Art, object record 1981.18 (print view)
And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them. And his mother kept all these words in her heart.
Luke 2:51 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner)