Difference between an art print and a giclée print explained
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A giclée print holds its colour register for forty to fifty years under normal indoor light, while a standard dye-based art print typically shifts within a decade. The distinction starts with the ink, not the image.
Art print and giclée print differences
An art print is a reproduction. A giclée is also a reproduction, but the distinction comes down to the technology, ink chemistry, substrate and colour workflow used to produce it.
What an art print means
The term art print covers a wide range of outputs: lithographs, standard digital prints, inkjet prints and screen prints. Concretely, a lithograph and a standard inkjet print share the label but not the ink chemistry, the paper weight or the lifespan.
Cheaper digital art prints often use four dye-based inks. Dye ink dissolves its colour in liquid, which makes it more vulnerable to light and humidity than pigment ink. That is why the question of whether giclée prints are worth buying becomes a practical one when you compare two prints side by side: the difference shows first in colour stability, pigment ink holds its register longer than dye ink under the same indoor light.
What makes a giclée print
The word giclée, pronounced zhee-clay, was coined by printmaker Jack Duganne in 1991 from the French verb gicler, meaning “to spray”. It describes a specific printing method: pigment-ink inkjet printing on archival-quality paper or canvas, with colour managed through an ICC profile matched to the exact printer-and-paper combination.
- Ink type: pigment-based inks, not dye-based inks. The colour particles are suspended rather than dissolved, which slows degradation under normal indoor light.
- Ink count: giclée printers commonly use eight or more colours, rather than the four-ink cartridge found in a standard office or high-street printer. The expanded set increases the colour gamut and handles tonal gradations more precisely.
- Substrate: acid-free, archival paper or canvas, often cotton rag paper or fine art paper, made to museum-quality or archival-quality standards. Cotton rag paper, which the gallery uses for the St Ives Boat print, contains no lignin, so it resists the yellowing that cheaper wood-pulp stock develops within a decade.
- Resolution and workflow: the source file is scanned or photographed at 300 dpi or higher, then printed on a wide-format inkjet printer operating at high resolution rather than on a standard desktop device.
The difference between giclée printing and standard inkjet printing is easiest to see in saturated colour and subtle tonal transitions. A four-ink printer can struggle where an expanded pigment set produces a clean gradation.
The image quality gap is most apparent where dark tones meet mid-range tones, and that is where screen-print artwork with its layered ink structure demands the most from a reproduction.
Fine art labels explained
Fine art printing is a broad term for printing made with artistic intent to a high standard. It does not specify the printing process, ink chemistry or expected lifespan of the finished sheet.
A fine art print may be produced on a standard dye inkjet printer, by offset lithography, through digital C-type photographic printing or with archival pigment inkjet. The difference between a giclée print and a generic fine art print is not guaranteed by the label alone: neither term is certified or protected by a standards body.
What matters is what is actually in the print: pigment or dye, an acid-free substrate or standard stock, and a colour-managed workflow or an approximate match. Those are the points I would verify before buying.
When The Artist's House Gallery uses the term artist-quality giclée, it refers to a defined production specification: pigment inks, an archival quality substrate and local production in Penzance. You can see this in the artist quality giclee print of the St Ives Boat, where the paper weight and ink set are stated alongside the size options.
That level of detail is more useful than a broad label. It gives you a criterion you can apply to any gallery or printer.
Original prints and reproductions
A giclée reproduction of an original hand-pulled screen print is not the original screen print. In the original, the screen is the artwork-making matrix, and each hand-pulled impression from that screen is an original work within a closed edition.
What changes is the matrix: a giclée prints from a digital file, not from the physical screen. I would buy the original screen print for a focal wall where texture and provenance matter, and the giclée for a hallway where a durable, colour-accurate reproduction works better in changing light.
A giclée print of an original screen print by Sarah Bell is produced from her hand-pulled original and carries the Art Deco poster-art influence of that source work. It is printed on 220gsm paper in four sizes from A4 to A1, with options for rolled, flat, window-mounted or framed delivery.
For anyone building a collection, the essential information is the edition record: whether the work is a reproduction or an original print, the edition size and the production specification, all stated in writing. A correctly labelled reproduction made to the right specification can hold its image for decades.
For the full range of Sarah Bell's reproductions, the Sarah Bell watercolour giclee prints collection shows the breadth of Cornish subjects available as high-quality giclée editions. I would choose a giclée on fine art paper when colour nuance matters most, and canvas when the room calls for a softer, more tactile surface.
Frequently asked questions
Is a giclée print better than a standard art print?
For long-term display, yes. Giclée printing uses pigment ink on an archival, acid-free substrate, so it resists fading far longer than dye-based ink on standard stock. Colour accuracy is also higher because the workflow is colour-managed with an ICC profile matched to the specific paper. The difference is clearest in dark tonal ranges and saturated colour, then becomes more apparent over years on a lit wall.
How can you tell if a print is a giclée?
Ask for four details: whether the ink is pigment rather than dye, how many inks are used, the paper name and weight, and whether the substrate is acid-free and lignin-free. A reputable producer should provide all four. A giclée on fine art paper or cotton rag paper has a distinct surface and tonal depth that standard four-ink inkjet printing cannot match at comparable magnification.
Are giclée prints worth the additional cost?
The higher price reflects the materials and the reproduction process. Pigment inks, wide-format giclée printers and archival substrates cost considerably more than standard inkjet printing on commodity paper. For artwork intended to remain on display for many years, or when accurate colour reproduction matters, I would choose giclée. For short-term decoration, a lower-cost digital print may be sufficient.