Giclée Print Longevity: How Long Archival Inks and Papers Last

Take a giclée print out of its frame after ten years on a bright wall and compare the margin that sat under the mat with the picture that did not. On a well-made print the two are the same colour. On a poor one the margin is brighter, the yellows have thinned, the greys have gone cool and the paper has turned the colour of weak tea. That comparison is the whole subject of archival printing: not whether a print looks right the day it leaves the printer, but whether it still looks right when your children take it off the wall.

This guide walks you through what "archival" is allowed to mean, how pigment inks differ from dye inks, what a cotton rag or baryta paper is made of, how permanence ratings are tested and what their numbers assume, the six ways a print fails, and the questions to put to a seller before you buy.

What "archival" is allowed to mean

There is no law that defines the word. It means something only when it is attached to named materials and a named test. Longevity is the product of four things: the ink, the paper, the way the print was handled between printer and frame, and the room it hangs in. A certificate that names the first two and a frame that controls the last two make an archival print. Anything less is a claim.

The standards that exist are worth knowing by number. ISO 9706 defines permanent paper: a neutral-to-alkaline pH, an alkaline reserve of calcium carbonate to absorb acids over time, a strict limit on lignin and a minimum tear strength. ISO 18902 covers the mats, boards and enclosures that touch a print. Light-fastness is measured by independent laboratories, of which Wilhelm Imaging Research and Aardenburg Imaging are the two whose ratings you will see quoted.

Pigment inks versus dye inks

The first giclée printers of the early 1990s sprayed dye inks, and the prints faded, which is where the word acquired the reputation it has spent thirty years living down. A dye is a colourant dissolved in liquid. It sinks into the paper's coating, gives a wide, glossy colour range, and is vulnerable to light, ozone and humidity.

A pigment is a solid. The particles are ground to well under a micron, wrapped in resin and suspended in the carrier fluid; on the paper they lodge in the top of the coating and stay there. Because a particle has to lose many molecules before its colour shifts, pigments fade far more slowly, and because they are not dissolved they do not run when wet. Every serious fine-art printer now uses a pigment set, Epson's UltraChrome and Canon's Lucia being the names you will meet most, with eight to twelve inks including, in the best of them, three or four dedicated greys.

Those greys matter more for an ink painting than for anything else. A monochrome image built from coloured inks drifts as the colours fade at different rates; one built from carbon-based grey inks does not, because carbon black is among the most stable colourants known. Yellow and magenta are the weakest links in any set, so a reproduction of a Huang Binhong landscape ages better than one of a red peony.

What the paper is made of

The base sheet is either cotton or alpha-cellulose. Cotton rag, made from cotton linters, is the traditional choice: long fibres, naturally free of lignin, strong when wet. Alpha-cellulose is wood pulp refined until the lignin and hemicellulose are removed, and a good alpha-cellulose sheet passes the same permanence tests. Neither contains the lignin that turns newspaper brown in a summer.

Buffering comes next: a permanent paper carries a reserve of calcium carbonate to neutralise acids that arrive from the air or from a cheap mat over the decades. Then there are optical brightening agents, fluorescent compounds that absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it as blue, which is what makes a bright white paper look bright. They decay, the paper shifts warmer as they do, and the change cannot be reversed. A paper labelled OBA-free or natural white gives up a little brilliance on day one for a colour that stays put.

The last layer is the coating. A fine-art inkjet paper carries a microporous receiving layer of ceramic particles that fixes the ink instantly and holds pigment in place. A watercolour block or a sheet of xuan paper has no such layer and cannot take a fine-art print; the ink spreads and the blacks go grey. Weight is a matter of handling rather than permanence.

Matte cotton, baryta and resin-coated: the three families

• Smooth and textured matte. Cotton or alpha-cellulose with a matte coating, in surfaces from perfectly smooth to a heavy watercolour grain. This is the family that looks most like a Chinese painting on paper: soft, absorbent to the eye, no reflection. The cost is a lower maximum black and a surface that scuffs if it is slid across another print.
• Baryta. A layer of barium sulphate under the coating, on a fibre base, gives the deepest blacks and the sheen of a darkroom photograph. Superb for dense ink; less convincing for a work whose original was on soft paper.
• Resin-coated. The paper is sealed between two layers of polyethylene. It dries fast, costs little and feels like plastic because it is; the family belongs to the photo lab, not to a numbered edition.

How permanence is actually tested

Ratings come from accelerated tests: prints are exposed to intense light from xenon-arc or fluorescent sources, measured until a defined amount of colour change has occurred, and the result is converted into years at a standard display condition. Wilhelm's published display-permanence ratings assume a print framed under glass in a room lit at 450 lux for twelve hours a day, roughly a well-lit living room without direct sun. That assumption is the whole meaning of the number. Halve the light and the rating roughly doubles; hang the print where sun reaches it and it can shrink by a factor of ten.

Under those conditions, pigment inks on good cotton papers earn ratings of a century or more for colour work and considerably longer for monochrome, while dye inks on the same papers earn a fraction of that. A rating belongs to a named ink on a named paper; change either and the number no longer applies, which is why a seller should be able to give you both.

How a print actually fails

• Light fading. Ultraviolet and blue light break down colourants. Yellow and magenta thin first, so the print drifts cool and flat, unevenly wherever a mat or a shadow protected part of the sheet.
• Gas fading. Ozone and other pollutants attack dye inks on microporous papers with particular speed, collapsing the cyan and leaving an orange cast. Pigments are largely immune.
• Paper yellowing. Lignin, residual acid and decaying brighteners all turn a sheet warm. A buffered cotton paper resists it; an acidic mat pressed against it does not.
• Humidity. Above about 60 per cent relative humidity, dyes migrate, paper cockles and mould becomes possible; below about 35 per cent, paper grows brittle. The target is a stable band between 40 and 55 per cent.
• Abrasion. Matte pigment prints mark more easily than any other kind, because the pigment sits at the surface. Never slide one print over another, and never stack them without an interleaving sheet.
• Outgassing. A fresh print gives off the humectants in its ink for a day or two. Framed too soon, that vapour fogs the inside of the glazing. Prints should dry between sheets of plain paper for at least twenty-four hours before they meet glass.

What to ask before you buy

A seller who prints editions seriously will answer these without hesitation; a seller who cannot has told you something.

• The ink set, by name. A pigment set from a current professional line, not "archival inks".
• The paper, by name and weight. A cotton or alpha-cellulose fine-art paper, buffered, and whether it is OBA-free.
• The source of the file. A colour-managed capture of the original itself, proofed against it, rather than a scan of a book plate or of another print.
• The edition. Size, numbering and what happens to the file when the edition closes. The edition numbers and the materials belong on the same certificate.

Treat these as warnings: "archival" or "museum quality" with no materials named; a canvas giclée of a work that was made on paper; a resin-coated glossy sheet in a numbered edition.

Display, storage and handling that keep the rating honest

Light is the variable you control most. Choose a wall that never receives direct sun and keep the print away from windows and spotlights. Ultraviolet-filtering acrylic or glass, a rag mat, a spacer so that the sheet never touches the glazing and hinges of Japanese tissue rather than tape are the conservation frame in outline.

Keep the frame off exterior walls, out of kitchens and bathrooms and away from radiators, where temperature and humidity swing. Store unframed prints flat, in an archival box, each sheet interleaved with acid-free tissue or glassine, and handle them by the edges with clean, dry hands. Tubes are for shipping, briefly; the guide to shipping, insuring and storing Chinese art covers the transit end. The regime is the one for caring for an original ink painting, because the enemies are the same.

The original and the reproduction, side by side

A Chinese ink painting is carbon, from pine soot or oil soot ink, bound in animal glue and sunk into a long-fibred, alkaline bark-and-straw paper. Carbon black does not fade; that is why Song ink survives while the organic colours around it, indigo, gamboge, safflower red, have often gone.

A good giclée reverses none of that. Its blacks are carbon pigment too. Its paper, if buffered and free of brighteners, is as permanent as the box a museum stores paper in, and its weak point, the yellows and reds, is exactly the weak point of the original. Framed and lit as described, a well-made pigment print of a twentieth-century ink master will outlast the room it hangs in. A poorly made one will not outlast the sofa.

Common questions

How long does a giclée print last?

With pigment inks on a buffered cotton or alpha-cellulose paper, framed under ultraviolet-filtering glazing and kept out of direct sun, independent display-permanence ratings run to a century or more for colour and longer for monochrome. The same print with dye inks, on resin-coated paper or hung in sunlight can show visible fading within ten to twenty years.

Are giclée prints archival?

Only when the materials are. Giclée describes the process, a fine-art inkjet print, not a grade of quality, and the word archival has no legal definition. A giclée made with a current pigment ink set on a named fine-art paper that meets ISO 9706 is archival in the sense that matters; one made with dye inks on a glossy resin-coated sheet is a poster.

Do giclée prints fade in sunlight?

Yes, and faster than most buyers expect. Permanence ratings assume around 450 lux for twelve hours a day behind glass, a bright room without sun. Direct sunlight reaches many thousands of lux and carries far more ultraviolet, so it can cut a rating by a factor of ten and shift the yellows visibly within a few years.

Should a giclée print be framed under glass?

Yes, or under acrylic, which is lighter and safer over a large sheet. Glazing protects the surface from abrasion, slows gas fading and, with an ultraviolet filter, removes the most damaging part of the light. Use a spacer or a mat so the print never touches the glazing, and let a fresh print dry for a day or two before framing so that the ink's humectants do not fog the glass from inside.

Further reading

• Limited Edition Prints Explained: Numbers, Giclee and COAs — the certificate and the edition that this article assumes.
• Giclée vs Original: What You're Really Buying When You Collect Chinese Master Prints — what the process is and is not.
• How to Frame Chinese Art on Paper: A Practical Guide — the conservation frame, layer by layer.
• How to Start a Collection of Twentieth-Century Chinese Ink Prints — where the longevity question sits in a first purchase.

Browse the collection

Kiln & Ink sells limited-edition archival giclée reproductions of the twentieth-century Chinese ink masters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity, and the questions in this article are the ones to put to us before you buy any of them. Browse the collection with the ink and the paper in mind as well as the image.