DESIGN / HENRI RIVIERE'S EIFFEL BLOCK PRINTS, 1888-1902

The First Winter

FROM RIVIERE'S 36 VIEWS OF THE FAMED TOWER 

GUEST BLOG / By Daisy Saintsbury writing in The Public Domain Review--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. 

 The Painter on the Tower 

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. 

Le Bateau en Seine

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. 

Ironworkers

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. 

The Coalman Unloading at the Quai from a Barge

AMERICANA / FRISCO CAB KILLS CASTRO CAT

Calamity Causing Way Mo’ Concern than Expected

KitKat & Community Are Crushed 

In a recent dispatch, The New York Times. sent star reporter Heather Knight to cover a tragic accident in San Francisco’s Mission District where a driverless taxi struck and killed a beloved neighborhood bodega cat. 

The incident has sent ripples far beyond the storefront — one store owner is catatonic with grief, the local community is shaking its head, and the broader questions about autonomous-vehicle safety are suddenly pressing. 

According to Knight’s reporting, the scene unfolded on a Monday night outside Randa’s Market, where the feline resident known as “KitKat” had for years held unofficial title as bodega mascot and rodent-control specialist. 

The driverless taxi, operated by Waymo, was making a passenger stop when the cat wandered beneath it. What followed turned a routine ride into a neighborhood calamity. 

Initial witness reports quoted in Knight’s article say the bodega cat sat near the sidewalk in front of the cab, which then pulled away and struck the animal. 

The store owner’s grief is palpable: the man who loved and fed KitKat is described as standing frozen in shock, speechless, unable to process the sudden loss of the four-legged fixture of his store. The article notes he remains in a state described by neighbors as “catatonic with grief.” 

Knight then moves the story for blocks on end, describing how the cat’s death became a kind of rolling lament from the Castro to the Mission and into the Lower Haight. Residents who never met the bodega owner nevertheless paused to tell her they felt as if a neighborhood elder had been taken away. At one corner, Knight reports, a woman clutching a canvas grocery tote fought back tears while describing how KitKat used to sit in the sun on the wooden pallet outside Randa’s Market, blinking slowly at passersby like a furry maître d’ granting them permission to enter the store. 

Farther down the block, she interviewed a barista who said the cat would sometimes follow regulars halfway home before trotting confidently back to its post. “He had commute patterns,” the barista joked, before his face fell. 

Knight writes that even the humor felt hollow, as if the city had lost one of its tiny threads of normalcy in an already frayed fabric. Knight captures scenes of clusters of people standing in small silence, the way mourners do without realizing it, each person privately sorting out why the death of a cat cut so deeply. 

She notes that it is not, in truth, about the cat alone. The unexpected fatality has awakened the very real worry that autonomous vehicles, now threading through packed residential corridors, may not be fully prepared for the unpredictable life that spills across San Francisco’s narrow streets. 

After all, children dart between parked cars, dogs slip leashes, seniors shuffle nearer to traffic than sensors assume. If a machine can’t register a cat, residents ask, what — or who — might be next? 

Knight quotes a longtime Mission resident who said the city keeps approving these vehicles “as if we’re a testing ground, not a community.” The woman added that she doesn’t blame the taxi entirely — “it’s not a person” — but she does blame the companies for pushing fleets into neighborhoods without the consent of those who must live with them. “Driverless cars might be the future,” she told Knight, “but I didn’t ask to be the future’s crash test dummy.” 

In her reporting, Knight also explores the emotional center of the story: the bodega owner, described by friends as a gentle man whose life revolves around his shop and the stray that became his companion. Since the accident, he has barely spoken. Neighbors told Knight he stands behind the counter staring at the empty crate where KitKat used to nap. 

One customer said the man attempted to ring up a sandwich order three times before realizing he had already done so. The grief, Knight writes, has hollowed him. 

Knight reconstructs the accident with her usual precision. The Waymo taxi had just dropped a passenger on 16th Street and began to pull away when KitKat wandered into the road. Surveillance footage reviewed by Knight shows the cat approaching the vehicle moments before it accelerated. 

The cab’s sensors, according to the company’s statement, “did not recognize a living obstruction of meaningful size.” Those words, Knight observes, have become a rallying cry online, where critics argue that “meaningful size” reveals the blind ethics of the technology — and the blind spot in the city’s regulatory framework. To illustrate the tension, Knight walks readers through the steps city officials have taken — and haven’t taken — to manage the proliferation of autonomous taxis. 

She cites public hearings where San Franciscans lined up to speak against the expansion of AV fleets, only to see state regulators approve new routes, new hours, and new privileges. Residents told her they felt spoken over by “data points and optimism.” KitKat’s death, they say, is exactly the sort of preventable tragedy they feared. 

Knight’s reporting shows how, after the accident, candles and flowers appeared instantly. Someone taped a photo of the cat to the lamppost with a note reading, “Our Little Guardian.” Another left a tiny bowl of dry food. Knight describes a child kneeling to place a feather toy beside the memorial, asking her mother whether the robots “feel sorry.” The mother, Knight writes, did not answer. 

Continuing her walk, Knight stops into nearby shops where owners tell her they worry the city is losing its soul one small grief at a time. The tech that promised a safer future now feels unpredictable, even careless. For many, KitKat represented a kind of neighborhood glue — one of those minor civic treasures that define a community more honestly than any official landmark. 

Yet Knight acknowledges the collision of perspectives. She interviews a young tech worker who argued that autonomous vehicles will reduce long-term fatalities and that the companies were being unfairly vilified for an accident that could just as easily have been caused by a human driver. Knight includes the comment without editorializing but notes the silence this opinion received from shoppers within earshot. 

By the article’s final third, Knight widens the lens again, framing the story, a War and Peace version of a second day epic, as a test of public trust. The death of the cat has become not just a neighborhood tragedy but an emblem of the growing mismatch between the people who live in San Francisco and the technologies introduced into their streets without their full consent. 

She writes that the city has long been a proving ground for innovation, but rarely has the community felt so vulnerable to the consequences. Knight ends her dispatch on a somber note. 

Returning to Randa’s Market late in the evening, she observes the owner quietly wipe down the counter while a small cluster of neighbors lights another candle outside. The man does not look up. He is surrounded by customers, yet alone. 

Outside, the flickering candles cast soft light on the growing memorial, dancing against the passing headlights of cars — some human-driven, some not. Knight’s final observation: for a city used to losing icons, the smallest icons are sometimes the ones mourned most. 

Credits: Illustration, Headlines and captions by PillartoPost.org Catastrophe Desk