Comment by msephton
2 years ago
No it doesn't underreport. Why? It's complicated.
Some of the ~100 known originals will never be available to view publicly, for a variety of reasons.
Many museums don't provide data on their collection, which reduces the possible count by a dozen or so.
Also it depends on your definition of "regular", as preservation demands they must be rested for 3+ years between viewings. So for example the impression in the Polish National Museum, Krakow, was last on view in 2021 and won't be viewable next until 2025 at the earliest.
Boston are currently showing one of their seven(!) impressions. I expected them to rotate it out part way through, but that has yet to happen.
Hopefully that answers your question.
> preservation demands they must be rested for 3+ years between viewings
Does the act of resting help the ink last longer or are they simply rate limiting the amount of light that the print receives?
As far as I know it's light, though I did see that The British Museum want to do some testing of inks/pigments on individual paper fibres to learn more.
Today I learned loads of stuff I didn't know I wanted to know. Thank you.