The Eiffel tower on paintings

Luis Jimenez Aranda (1845-1928)

Luis Jimenez y Aranda, is a painter from the School of Fine Arts in Seville, his hometown in which he made his debut before leaving his country to settle in Rome, then in Paris and finally in Pontoise, a city where he settled permanently in 1876. His work is characterized on the one hand by an academic production that made the fair days of universal exhibitions and different salons, and partly by a freer painting approaching realism. Despite the presence in Pontoise many painters concommitament to his installation there is no connection between them, which made his original work.

Dame à la tour Eiffel lors de l'exposition

The purpose of this painting is to highlight women in everyday life in the face of the immensity of the Eiffel Tower, partially depicted as a 'backdrop'.

Dame à la tour Eiffel lors de l'exposition

The purpose of this painting is to highlight women in everyday life in the face of the immensity of the Eiffel Tower, partially depicted as a 'backdrop'.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Marc Chagall is recognized in one of the most important artist of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most criticized. Born July 7, 1887 in Russia, he will come to France in 1923 where he will remain until the end of his days, except for a period when he will settle in the USA. He will take French nationality. He becomes a painter. During the 30's he traveled to Palestine and then all over Europe. It was during the second world war that he moved to the United States, and it was during this period that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York devoted a retrospective to him, which gives an international dimension to his work. In 1977 he exhibited at the Louvre (Paris) his work from 1967 to 1977. The characteristic of Chagall is that its support, its forms and colors are inspired by Russian expressionism and French cubism.

Le pont de Passy et la tour Eiffel

The purpose of this painting is to show the urbanization of Paris. The composition shows converging lines towards the center of the canvas, which gives a certain dynamism to the canvas and focuses the eye on the Eiffel Tower, the main subject of the work. A blood red road leads the look inward with a perspective towards the focal point. There is a large diagonal that appears better in hindsight, formed by the road and its reflection in the sky, blue. Below, a wall of red brick creates a dynamic momentum in the painting which is interrupted on the left by the new Passy Bridge, above which the painter represented one of the new metro lines of the city.

The whole painting is energetic, the composition is based on the discordant juxtaposition of colors. A painting on transport, communication and speed does not fit well with the contradictory presence of timelessness suggested by a horse, an element of Chagall's personal imagery.

This painting is signed below, in the center: "Marc Chagall 1911"

Paris par la fenêtre

"Paris by the window" is an important work in Chagall's list of works. It contains a recurring element in his paintings, the character of the corner, but also two types of element: dreamlike elements and real ones. Among the dreamlike elements are an upside-down train, a cat-human hybrid and a couple lying in the air. Among the real elements, there is a bouquet of flowers on a chair, the Eiffel Tower, and of course the Eiffel Tower. The whole exudes a strange sensation where Paris is seen as a mysterious city in which what is visible is not the reality of what is there. The double face is one of the main elements, but it is especially the Eiffel Tower which is highlighted, the artist having decided to make it exceed the frame. Its color, white, confirms that the chromaticism of the canvas is dreamlike, because nothing of what is there in its natural color. The whiteness of the Eiffel Tower contrasts with the red and blue of the rest of the painting.

In a general way this work represents a window, ie a separation between inside and outside. In an imaginative way, this separation is also that of the style of painting, between classicism and modernism, but also between the real world and the virtual, imaginary world.

Paul Louis Delance (1848-1924)

Paul Louis Delance is a French painter of the nineteenth century. Originally protected by the Third Republic, which passes many orders, he will then move to historical painting before switching in 1892 to landscapes and portraits. This change is due to a significant event in his private life, the death of his wife. Delance is an artist who has produced a large number of paintings. From 1880 he became known and became a member of the Salon des artistes français. In 1889 he painted this painting, "The Eiffel Tower and the Field of Mars", which shows the progress of the tower at the beginning of the year.

La tour Eiffel et le champs de Mars

The interest of this painting is that it represents the Eiffel Tower during its construction, which is quite rare. History has left us some pictures of this time, but a painting is interesting because it is colorful, especially if, like here, the artist has made a faithful reproduction of reality. Paris is very urbanized, with many smoke rising in the sky, and buildings built along the Seine, where nowadays there are docks. It must be said that we are in full work for the World Expo, which explains their presence, so dense.

The painting itself is rather faithful to the reality of the time. The colors are of good quality. The composition is quite classic, with the beautiful part made to the Seine, and a eiffel tower just entering the frame, with its top works.

This painting is signed on the front of the painting, lower left: "Paul DELANCE January 1889".

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)

Raoul Dufy is a French artist of the first half of the 20th century. It is characterized by a work on a very large number of support that it applies to various fields. Thus he does not content himself with making painted canvases, he also produces engravings, sculptures, tapestries, he also works for stage sets, in the field of home improvement, etc. Artistically he follows the currents of his time, starting his career in impressionism, then he takes the turn of Fauvism before shining in cubism. We can not count his achievements as there are, especially since some have been destroyed by the artist himself. From a general point of view it can be said that Dufy's works are full of joy and optimism.

The work presented below is named "The Eiffel Tower" he made it in 1935. It is about a watercolor.

La tour Eiffel

This watercolor representing the Eiffel Tower is very light. As is often the case in Dufy's work, what is represented is seen positively. Here, it is essentially the colors that give this impression of serenity. The blue sky charged with blue cloud also contrasts with the green of the fields of Mars. The skyline is marked by the Parisian buildings that are content to emphasize, by their platitudes, the height of the Eiffel Tower. Note that this one is drawn in red, a color that, in 1935, had already been replaced by the brown that we know nowadays.

This watercolor is not the best known of Dufy, it is probably not the most interesting either, but its composition and the use of the artist's colors mark an obvious artistic skill.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955)

Fernand Léger is a French painter of the first half of the twentieth century, painter diversified since he also worked in tapestry, stained glass, sculpture, drawing, illustration, but he also made decorations and ceramics . He is at the base of Cubism, inventing the first codes of this new genre. Raised in Paris in 1900 to study architecture he will never do, he preferred to settle as an artist, at the risk of failure. Personally Fernand Léger is known to have been a relatively frustrated person.

Les constructeurs

This painting is a major work of Fernand Léger. It is the culmination of a dozen other paintings, named Builders, which are increasingly in line with what the artist wanted. The final state is a representation of the work of the workers who built the Eiffel Tower and therefore a tribute to the workers as a general point of view. He builds the site in the horizontal form, the beams, perfectly rectilinear, crosses the work essentially from left to right and not from top to bottom. Verticality is suggested only by the succession of workers placed one above the other. Everything in the painting is supposed to represent the technicity, rectilinear, which opposes the curves of the rope, in the foreground, and the clouds, in the background. It is this duality that challenges the viewer. Note the unusual presence of a vine, reminiscent of nature in a purely artificial composition.

The composition of the table, in the form of a grid, is typical of Leger's work. She gives her work its power, a power emphasized by the use of bright colors.