Work began on Gustave Eiffel’s tower in January 1887 and finished in time for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. At 330 metres it was the tallest thing humans had built, and Paris hated it before the foundations were set: a “monstrous” eyesore that would overshadow Notre Dame, a “hole-riddled suppository” (Huysmans), a “truly tragic streetlamp” (Léon Bloy).

Henri Rivière answered the fight with thirty-six prints instead of a manifesto, modelled on Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji:

  • Rivière (1864–1951) wanted to reproduce not just the Japanese visual vocabulary but the technique. There were no manuals, so he guessed — water-diluted pigments instead of Europe’s oily opaque inks, and a home-made disc “barren” to press the paper by hand.
  • He started in 1888 with actual colour woodcuts, then switched to lithography once he judged the process too slow and too limited in edition size. The experiments show through anyway.
  • The French print trade split the artist who supplied the image from the artisan who cut and printed it. Rivière did both, which is a quiet argument about who authors a print.
  • Where Hokusai painted fishermen and rice harvesters, Rivière painted the workers of an industrial age: coalmen on the Quai de Passy, barges, freight haulers, an ironworker-plumber inside the tower. Browns and greys instead of Hokusai’s blues and greens.
  • Four plates come from photographs Rivière took on a press tour while the tower was still under construction — ukiyo-e composition on one side, the snapshot on the other.
  • The framing is fragmentary by design. The tower appears truncated, glimpsed between buildings or above rooftops, never whole. Paris (540,000 people at the start of the century, 2.7 million at the end) shows up as chimney pots running out of frame.

The result is a monument’s self-portrait from below. The tower that critics called useless gets drawn from barges and building sites and railway stations — and the men who riveted it together get the close-ups.

The collection is public domain worldwide, CC0-labelled by source, and two plates missing from the Musée Carnavalet copy are linked from Wikimedia scans. Worth scrolling to the end.