The Artists' Response: From Hatred to Love

The tower's relationship with the artistic community began with spectacular hostility. The "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel" published in 1887 by leading cultural figures called it a "gigantic black smokestack" that would crush Paris beneath its "barbarous mass." Yet within a generation, many of these same critics would celebrate it.

Guy de Maupassant, one of the tower's fiercest opponents, famously claimed he ate lunch at the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris where he couldn't see the "abomination." Yet his short stories began featuring the tower as a symbol of modern life. His transformation mirrors that of Paris's artistic elite.

By 1889, painters had discovered the tower's visual possibilities. Georges Seurat included it in several works, using his pointillist technique to capture how iron dissolved into light. The tower's geometric structure perfectly suited the Neo-Impressionist interest in scientific color theory and mathematical composition.

Henri Rivière's series "Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower" (1888-1902) explicitly connected the tower to Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji, establishing it as Paris's sacred mountain. Each print showed the tower from different neighborhoods, in various weather conditions, making it both monumental and intimate—a constant presence in Parisian life.