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.
