Galerie Paul Prouté

Familiar with the world of illustration from an early age (he contributed drawings to the magazine Le Chat noir and produced lithographs based on the sets he had designed for the shadow theatre of the same name), Henri Rivière became, at the turn of the 20th century, one of the country’s leading painter-printmakers and an active innovator in colour printmaking.

Drawing on both Nabis and Naturalist influences, and combining Japonisme with Impressionism, his colour woodcuts and lithographs brought a new approach, with a distinctly decorative sensibility, to the depiction of both Paris (his series Trente-six vues de la tour Eiffel being among his most celebrated works) and Brittany (his series La Mer and La Féérie des Heures, among many others, are equally renowned).

From 1914 onwards, Rivière gradually moved away from printmaking and devoted the final years of his life to producing numerous watercolours, for his own pleasure and for those close to him. These depicted first Brittany and later Provence, where he settled towards the end of his life.