This panoramic view showing the Champ de Mars, with the École Militaire prominent to the left, is an unused design for Girtin’s Picturesque Views in Paris. The three small pieces of paper exactly match those used to make up the extended city scenes that the artist himself reproduced as soft-ground etchings, and, like many of the other Paris drawings, they appear to have been made using a small camera obscura. The set of aquatints that eventually appeared as Twenty of the Most Picturesque Views in Paris and Its Environs in the months after Girtin’s death was the most important outcome of his trip to Paris, after the artist failed to secure a showing of his London panorama there. This drawing, if it had been engraved, would have formed a continuation of plate five (see print after TG1868), another panoramic view of the city. Both views were taken from the village of Chaillot, and together they would have completed a vista of more than two hundred degrees in extent. The extended view focuses on the higher ground to the south west at Sèvres, which was the site from which Girtin took two pencil drawings of the city’s environs (TG1881 and TG1886a), in the company of Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809).

It is not known why Girtin decided not to engrave this view, but perhaps he felt that there were already enough panoramic images of Paris and that, given plate five also shows a relatively featureless sector of the capital, this view might be safely jettisoned. In fact, the parade ground for the military academy, seen to the left, was used during the French Revolution as an open-air ceremonial space, including the famous Festival of the Supreme Being (1794), which was overseen by the great Neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), and this might have been of interest to British visitors to Paris, who flocked to the capital during the brief cessation of hostilities known as the Peace of Amiens. However, the prints were titled in both French and English and were clearly targeted by the Girtin brothers at a French audience as well. It is possible that they thought that references to the events of the revolution might harm the chance of sales, and the scenes chosen for the publication are generally coy about recent history.

All but one of the supports used in the Paris sketches have been identified by the paper historian Peter Bower as 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.

1802

A Panoramic View of Paris from Chaillot, Looking Up the Seine with the Dome of Les Invalides: Pencil Study for Plate Five of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1868

1802

Bellevue and the Pont de Sèvres, Taken from near the Pont de Saint-Cloud: Pencil Study for Plate Thirteen of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1881

1802

Saint-Cloud and Mont Calvaire, Taken from the Pont de Sèvres: Pencil Study for Plate Eighteen of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1886a