Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Stéphane Samuel and Robert Melvin Rubin, 2013, Accession Number: 2013.1101
Curatorial description (Accessed: 9 January 2018)
The brothers Étienne and Louis-Antonin Neurdein operated a successful commercial photography studio in Paris for half a century. In 1899 they won the gold medal for photography at the Exposition Universellefor which the Eiffel Tower remains the enduring symbol. The world's fair was scheduled to celebrate the centennial of the storming of the Bastille and the start of the French Revolution. City commissioners selected Gustave Eiffel's dramatic iron tower over the other design-contest entries, including one for a three-hundred-meter-high guillotine. During the six-month fair, some thirty million visitors attended: many climbed up the tower to look down upon the city from the second floor platformas far as one could ascend at the time.
