Henri Rousseau – Quai d’Ivry

Quai d’Ivry – a hand-painted reproduction

A pale ochre embankment curves across the middle of the picture, and about a dozen small
dark figures are walking along it – men in dark coats and hats, women in long dark dresses,
one carrying something red, one in a yellow hat. Below, a flat dark green expanse of water
fills the lower third. In the sky at the upper right floats an elongated pale cream airship
with a small gondola slung beneath it. At the left stands a file of tall dark poplars; beside
them a white building with red roofs and a dark lattice bridge structure, with a small dark
red wagon on the bank. At the right rise rows of pale houses with red roofs and, at the far
edge, a tall red-brown factory chimney. Trees in orange and rust fill the middle distance.
The sky is pale grey-blue.

An airship over the suburbs

This is one of the few canvases on this shelf with a machine in the air. The painter did
not put it at the centre: it floats high at the right, small against the sky, and not one of
the walkers looks up. That passing quality is what makes the scene read as one afternoon
rather than as a celebration of progress. What the machine was we do not claim – the record
says nothing about it, and a shape alone cannot carry that. If this meeting of old and new
interests you, see also View of the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro, where the same painter takes on the most famous
structure in Paris.

River, factories and a Sunday walk

The scene is built from three bands: water, an embankment busy with people, and an
industrial bank. The same structure returns in View of the Clichy Bridge at Asnières, where a bridge and chimneys stand
on the same river, and in The Great Laundry Boat at Charenton Bridge, where the foreground is work rather than a walk.
Together they form a small series about a Paris that is not a postcard: a factory and a
poplar stand in one picture, with no verdict about which belonged there first.

What it means on a wall

The original measures 46.1 cm x 55 cm. Because the motif is built from horizontal bands
and small figures, it works better at the larger sizes – at a small one the walkers merge
into dots, while at a metre each of them gets a hat and a stride. We do not copy canvases at
their original size; you choose the size for your wall. For the opposite case, a rural scene
with no architecture at all, look at The Banks of the Oise.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from a high-resolution photograph of the original – here the largest source in this group –
layer by layer, so that the small figures, the gondola under the airship and the red roofs
stay readable even at smaller sizes. Because this is handwork, two canvases of the same size
are always slightly different; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and
a print. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.