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Fernand Léger, who loved cities and was attracted by the dynamism of a mechanized civilization, created a number of paintings on the subject of a modern city especially from right after the end of the First World War to the early 1920s. Léger said about a modernizing city: “After the war, walls, streets, objects suddenly became intensely colored. The houses dressed up in blue, yellow, red. Gigantic letters were written on them. That is radiant, brutal life.” From 1918 to 1919, he represented such an image of the city on his large-scale work titled The City, measuring 231 x 298 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art). This watercolor is a preparatory study for The City. In The City, Léger depicted the city landscape, including buildings, scaffolding, billboards, and workers. As the artist himself said in later years, “In La Ville [The City], I composed a picture exclusively with pure, flat colors. Technically, that picture was a plastic revolution. One could achieve depth and dynamism without modulation or chiaroscuro,” Léger superbly condensed colors, bustles, and dynamism filling the streets of an industrializing city into one picture surface through his revolutionary representation with overlapping flat colors and geometric shapes.