A lithograph from Henri Rivière's series, capturing a windswept Parisian street scene with the Eiffel Tower visible in the distance.

Henri Rivière, a central figure in the French printmaking revival, produced his series 'Les Trente-six vues de la tour Eiffel' between 1888 and 1902. This specific plate, depicting the view from Lamarck Street, captures a quiet, windswept moment in Montmartre. The composition demonstrates the clear influence of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, particularly the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige, which were highly popular among Parisian artists of the period.

Rivière employs a flattened perspective and a restricted, muted colour palette to convey the atmosphere of a rainy day. The wet pavement reflects the grey sky, while the stark silhouettes of the street lamps and a lone figure provide a sense of scale and human presence. The Eiffel Tower, a modern marvel at the time, appears as a distant, almost ethereal form on the horizon, integrated into the traditional urban fabric of Paris. The use of lithography allows for subtle gradations of tone, creating a soft, painterly quality that contrasts with the precise, graphic lines of the architecture and the fence.

This work is an example of how artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries synthesised Eastern aesthetic principles with Western subject matter. By choosing a consistent, repetitive subject—the Eiffel Tower—Rivière explores the changing nature of the Parisian environment through different weather conditions, times of day, and vantage points. The print avoids unnecessary detail, focusing instead on the mood and the graphic arrangement of shapes within the frame. It remains a precise observation of early twentieth-century urban life, stripped of sentimentality and presented with a disciplined, artistic eye.