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negatives used by Bonnard and other artists. He was a
skilled technician, mastering the cyanotype for images
with shadows requiring contrast and the gelatin-silver
print on matt paper to achieve luminous greys.
The Chat Noir photographs reveal Rivière’s fi n-de-
siècle fascination with light, shade and silhouettes.
Rivière described the lantern of the theatre as “the soul
of the retreat,” in an article in Le Temps, 1894, underlin-
ing the importance of light in his work and explaining
in part his attraction to photography. These images fi t a
time when photographers such as his acquaintance Ed-
gar Degas was experimenting with the effects of artifi cial
light, reversing shades of light and dark. The abstract
compositions and unusual perspectives pre-empt the
later works of the Bauhaus photographer Laszlo Mo-
holy-Nagy and modernists Ilse Bing and Man Ray.
Alongside the Chat Noir photographs, Rivière pho-
tographed other motifs that he used in his engravings.
He focused on modern scenes of Paris around 1889,
echoing Impressionist paintings of street life, with
peoples’ heads or feet cropped and shadows protrud-
ing into the frame from all corners. He concentrated
on intimate scenes of family life in the 1890s, and his
photographic portraits reveal silhouettes reminiscent
of his shadow theatre days, and a fl uid style recalling
Degas’ pastel outlines. Rivière focused on Breton ports
and countryside from 1885 to 1900 and then miscel-
laneous subjects for the next twelve years. He covered
topics beyond the pictorialist visions of outdoor nature
in his prints, and used photography to record personal
portraits and interior views of his home, restricted, or
inspired, by the space and light in the apartment. By
1886 he and his wife Eugenie had a summer house in
Loguivy, Brittany, and a large Parisian apartment on the
Boulevard de Clichy.
Rivière combined classical, modern and decorative
styles to produce elegant compositions, heavily infl u-
enced by the Japonaism popular at the time. Although
Rivière was opposed to overt stylisation in art and ex-
amined nature fervently, his wood block prints reveal
stylistic techniques from Japanese artworks—high
perspective, unusual crops and large fl at expanses of
colour. Amassing one of the largest collections of orien-
tal objects in nineteenth-century Paris, Rivière became
close friends with a dealer, Florine Epstein-Langweil,
and worked with his patron Tadamasa Hayashi, who
imported Japanese woodblock prints to France.
His photographs of Paris reveal the modernist steep
perspectives and sharp angles, stemming from Japa-
nese infl uences. From 1899 Rivière used photographs
and sketches to document the building of the Eiffel
tower. He used these preliminary studies for a set of
woodblock prints, after Hokusai, Les Trente-Six Vues
de la Tour Eiffel, published as lithographs in 1902. He
was the fi rst person to image the Eiffel Tower and both
his photographs and his resulting prints present radical
abstract views. The prints were well received, Roger
Marx writing in the Revue Encyclopedique ten years
later that since producing them, Rivere ‘has a cult of
admiration long overdue’ (Toudouze, 135).
Although Rivière did not intend his photographs to be
“art,” today they have been lifted from obscurity. Tech-
nically competent and aesthetically daring, Rivière’s
photographs bare witness to the nineteenth-century
fascination with the effects of light and shade, steep per-
spectives and modern scenes and are both documentary
and artistic. They pre-empt the modernist movement that
gripped Paris in the 1920s and ’30s and despite the self-
effacing nature of the artist, are important proof of the
fast pace of nineteenth-century Paris and the changing
role of photography.
Sophie LeightonBiography
Benjamin Jean Pierre Henri Rivière was born in Mont-
martre, Paris, in 1864. He spent much time in Brittany
and Aix-les-Thermes, in the Pyrennes. His father died
in 1873 and his mother remarried in 1875. A friend of
his step-father, Emile “Père” Bin, academic painter and
teacher, accepts Henri Rivière into his studio in. Rivière
met Rudolpe Salis in 1882 and discovered the Chat Noir,
an artistic cabaret. From 1886 to 1896 Rivière ran the
Shadow Theatre at the Chat Noir. He participated in his
fi rst exhibition in 1886, of works by Chat Noir artists.
He met Eugenie Estelle Ley in 1888 and they married in- In 1888 Rivière taught himself to make woodblock
prints. From 1888–1902 Rivière worked on a series of
lithographs of the Eiffel tower. Andre Antoine, friend of
Rivière, formed the Theatre Libre and in 1888 commis-
sioned Rivière to produce a program, co-produced with
Eugene Verneau, a commercial lithographic printer who
collaborated with Rivière on prints. In 1896 the Rivières
bought a summer house in Loguivy, Brittany. Rivière
produced his fi rst major lithograph edition L’Hiver in
1896 and continued with engraving, photography and
watercolour painting. His wife died in 1943. Rivière
died in 1951, aged 87.
See also: Artifi cial Lighting; Degas, Edgar; France;
Impressionistic Photography; and Societies, groups,
institutions, and exhibitions in France.Further Reading
Cate, Phillip Dennis, Henri Rivière: A retrospective exhibition,
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, New Jersey, 1983
(exhibition catalogue).
Fields, Armond, Henri Rivière, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith
Books, 1983.
Fossier, François, Heilbrun, Françoise and Néagu, Philippe