This view of Saint-Cloud, taken from the Pont de Sèvres over the river Seine, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate eighteen of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1886b). Having completed a series of highly detailed panoramic drawings in the capital itself, Girtin engaged the help of the playwright Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) to ‘take views in the environs of Paris’ in a series of ‘short excursions’ to the sites ‘esteemed the most picturesque’ by contemporary artists (Holcroft, 1804, vol.2, p.488).¹ Holcroft’s account of their trips, published in 1804, provides the only first-hand evidence of Girtin’s sketching practice, including, in this case, the fact that unlike in the city views, for which the artist almost certainly employed a camera obscura, here he worked freehand at speed. On the second of their excursions, travelling west from Paris, Holcroft noted how Girtin had ‘confirmed the remarks I had made, on the landscapes of France: they are spotty, naked, having no hedges and trees only where there are forests, except very rarely, with few grand masses, ragged broken lines, little verdure, and a prevailing grey tone’. ‘To all this Saint Cloud is a remarkable exception’, the author added, ‘and on the wooden bridge, disgraceful to such a neighbourhood but an object fit for a painter, Girtin took a view’. Moreover, as the sketch indicates, the artist did not make ‘finished’ drawings, doing just enough so that ‘all the objects were in their proper place, and sufficiently made out for him to accurately understand his own intentions’ (Holcroft, 1804, vol.2, p.491). Although these works are different in character from the city sketches, the artist continued to use the same support, which, as the paper historian Peter Bower has noted, is a cream laid writing paper made by the Blauw and Briel company in Holland (Smith, 2002b, p.141; Bower, Report). This, he believes, was bought by Girtin in Paris, and may have been made twenty years earlier.

Girtin’s soft-ground etching (see the print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 9 August 1802. To create this autograph print, the artist first traced his own drawing, reversing the image in the process (see figure 1), and then, using the tracing as a template, impressed the lines onto an etching plate coated in a tacky ground of an acid-resistant mix. Lifting the tracing and taking away the ground where the lines had been pushed in, he would then have immersed the plate in acid, which would have bitten into the unprotected areas. Cleaned up, the plate, with the etched lines now according with the direction of Girtin’s original drawing, could then be used to print from. Such a complex procedure employed by a novice printmaker like Girtin no doubt required a number of proof stages. The surviving example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see figure 2) includes a number of additions in pencil, mainly relating to the trees on the far bank.