Henri Rivière’s *Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower* (1888–1902) — The Public Domain Review

Henri Rivière (1864–1951), a Paris-born artist who spent his time between the French capital and the coast of Brittany, shared this enthusiasm, but was unique among his peers in being the first to attempt not only the visual vocabulary of the Japanese masters but also their printing methods. In 1888, as the Eiffel Tower began to take shape on the banks of the Seine, Rivière began working on an idea for a series of color woodcuts based on Hokusai’s work. Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji (1830-1832). Because there were no manuals on Japanese printing techniques at the time, he had to work on the basis of guesswork and trial and error. He experimented with pigments diluted in water instead of the oily, opaque inks used in Europe, and devised improvised tools, such as a disc-shaped ‘barren’ used to transfer the woodcuts to paper by hand. In doing so, he blurred the traditional distinction maintained in France between the artist, who provided the original image for printing, and the craftsman or technician, who engraved the artist’s original on wood and then turned it into a series of prints.