From the Quai de Grenelle

From the Quai de Grenelle is one of the thirty-six colour lithographs in Henri Rivière's album Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, published in Paris in 1902. Lithography is a printing method in which the picture is drawn directly onto a flat stone and then printed onto paper. The album's title is a deliberate tribute to Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, with the new iron tower taking the place of Japan's sacred mountain. Rivière had started drawing the tower in 1888, while it was still being built, and worked on the project for about fourteen years. That same year a new Paris journal devoted to Japanese art inspired him to begin collecting Japanese prints and to teach himself Japanese woodblock printing, making his own tools and mixing his own inks. Rivière was born in Paris in 1864 and grew up alongside his school friend, the painter Paul Signac. In the 1880s he worked for the Chat Noir, a famous cabaret in Montmartre, where he created a celebrated shadow theatre that ran for about a decade.