In late January 1887, construction work began on Gustave Eiffel’s eponymous tower — a process that was completed at record speed, just in time for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. At 330 metres, the tower would be the world’s tallest manmade structure to date, a beacon of France’s industrial prowess, but no sooner had the foundations been laid than the controversy began. Critics feared a “useless”, “monstruous” eyesore that would overshadow Notre Dame, the Pantheon, and other cherished monuments on the Parisian skyline. As the tower emerged, one iron girder after the next, the verdicts came in: a “hole-riddled suppository” (Joris-Karl Huysmans), a “truly tragic streetlamp” (Léon Bloy). Others were more positive, seeing in this unprecedented feat of engineering the same symbol of modernity that would be immortalised, decades later, in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams or Marc Chagall’s and Robert Delauney’s paintings. But what did the artists of the time make of the so-called Iron Lady, and how did they set about capturing in their art something of what the tower seemed to embody about the modern world?

Japanese woodblock printing may not be the obvious answer, but it was perhaps an inevitable one, given the wave of Japonisme that subsumed France in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The craze for all things Japanese began in the 1850s when, after a long period of self-imposed isolation, the country opened up to international trade, triggering an influx of goods — fans, screens, kimonos, ukiyo-e woodblock prints — onto the European market. Artists such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, and Vincent Van Gogh drew inspiration from the then-unfamiliar aesthetics of Japanese prints, their novel compositions and perspectives, their colour blocks, heavy black outlines, and use of empty space.

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 that he was the first to attempt to replicate not just 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 started working on an idea for a series of colour woodcuts based on Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–32). There being no manuals on Japanese printing techniques at the time, he had to proceed by guesswork and trial and error. He experimented with pigments diluted in water rather than the oily, opaque inks used in Europe, and devised makeshift tools, such as a disk-shaped “barren” used to transfer the woodcuts onto paper by hand. In the process, he blurred a traditional distinction maintained in France between the artist, who supplied the original image for printing, and the artisan or technician, who engraved the artist’s original onto wood and then transformed it into a series of prints.

During this period of experimentation, Rivière created two colour woodcuts Le chantier de la Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower’s construction site) and La Tour Eiffel du viaduc d’Auteuil (The Eiffel Tower from the Auteuil viaduct), before determining that the process was too time consuming and restrictive in the small number of prints that could be produced. Later, he decided to pursue his thirty-six views of the Eiffel Tower as lithographs, but these early experiments appear to have left their mark. Some of the most arresting images in Les trente-six vues de la Tour Eiffel are those that depict labourers, technicians, and craftsmen — the many hands that made the rapid-fire construction project possible. In place of the fishermen and rice harvesters that appear in Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Rivière presents the workers of an industrial age — figures hauling freight, loading up steamboats, or harnessed to iron beams. Instead of the bright blues and greens Hokusai used to represent the natural world, Rivière adopts a more muted palette of browns and greys reflective of the metalwork and masonry of the modern urban environment.

Most striking of all is how Rivière uses the cropped compositions characteristic of Japanese woodblock prints to capture the fragmentary way in which the contemporary viewer encounters the Eiffel Tower, and the city more broadly. The tower, in all its unprecedented scale, is more often than not glimpsed between buildings or rising above roof tops, appearing in truncated form rather than as a cohesive whole. So, too, Paris, whose population grew from around 540,000 to 2.7 million over the course of the nineteenth century, finds an apt expression in a cluster of chimney pots that sprawl off into the distance and disappear out of frame, as if gesturing toward the city’s boundless size.

Interesting in this respect are the images depicting close-ups of the tower’s girders: En haut de la Tour (At the top of the tower), Dans la Tour (On the tower), Ouvrier plombier dans la Tour (Ironworker on the tower), and Le peintre dans la Tour (The painter on the tower). These four images were based on photographs the artist took during a press tour of the tower while it was still under construction. The resulting lithographs look simultaneously backward and forward — backward to the compositional techniques of the ukiyo-e tradition and forward to the burgeoning realm of photography, with its own distinct format: the snapshot.

All of Rivière’s views can be browsed below, save two, which appear to be missing from the Musée Carnavalet’s copy. The missing images are available here and here.