Henri Rousseau – The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower – a hand-painted reproduction

A wide pale river fills the lower half of the picture, streaked in horizontal bands with
pink, cream and lilac evening light. At the left stands a squat pale grey building with a
steep blue roof and a single tall ochre chimney; a heaped ochre mound lies beside it, and
below it three dark flat boats are moored along a pale quay wall that runs down to the lower
left corner. Mid-river a small red-brown boat with a black funnel throws a broad white wake
behind it. In the middle distance a dark arched bridge crosses the water, its parapet
carrying a dense row of small lamps in red, yellow and white. Behind the bridge rises a
slender dark lattice tower with a glowing orange lantern near the top and a small dark mast
at the very summit. At the right a pale grey embankment falls away towards the lower right
corner; on it stand three small dark figures in dark coats and broad hats, each holding a
thin rod angled down to the water, and behind them lie five rounded mounds of pale ochre
sand. Beyond the right bank rise three tall slender ochre factory chimneys, and among dark
trees stand pale buildings with dark roofs and a few warm yellow lit windows. Pale blue-grey
slopes close the view on either side. The sky is pale blue above and crossed at mid-height by
horizontal bands of pink, salmon, cream and grey cloud. At the lower left is the dark
signature Henri Rousseau.

The tower stands behind the bridge, not above the city

The painting is named for the tower, yet the tower is not its hero. It is painted small
and slender, far back, and what places it in space is the bridge in front of it: the lattice
only begins to rise where the line of lamps along the parapet ends. That is why the scene
reads as a look upward from the water rather than as a postcard. The same painter at the same
subject, seen from another side and in another proportion, is View of the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro. What the bridge in front
of the tower is we do not claim – the record says nothing about it, and the shape alone
cannot carry it.

Lamps on the parapet, a wake on the water

What holds the scene together is dusk light: the row of small lamps on the bridge, the
glowing point near the top of the tower, and a few warm yellow windows among the trees on the
right bank. Everything else is cool – the water, the slopes, the sky. The same handling, the
river and a bridge as two horizontal bands, returns in View of the Clichy Bridge at Asnières, where the bridge is nearer and
the day brighter, and in The Great Laundry Boat at Charenton Bridge, where work on the water takes the foreground instead of
evening stillness. Together they make a small series about a river that runs through a city
rather than past it.

What it means on the wall

The original measures 52.4 cm x 77.2 cm and is markedly landscape. Because the composition
is built from horizontal bands, it carries wide sizes better than tall ones: at small sizes
the three anglers on the right embankment and the lamps on the bridge collapse into dots,
while past a metre in width each of them regains its own shape. We do not reproduce canvases
at the original measurement; you choose the size for your wall. For the opposite case, a
rural scene with no architecture in it, see The Banks of the Oise.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is painted by hand in oils, to order, in the size you choose. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the small
lamps on the bridge, the wake behind the boat and the three figures on the embankment stay
legible at smaller sizes too. Because this is hand work, two canvases of the same size always
differ slightly; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a print.
Prices on this page start at 155 EUR for the smallest size.