This view of the Pont de la Tournelle and the east end of Notre Dame, taken from the Arsenal, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate eleven of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1878a). Frustrated in his attempt to show his London panorama in Paris, Girtin took up the suggestion of his patron Sir George Howland Beaumont (1753–1827) and made a series of detailed pencil drawings of the French capital, which he reproduced as soft-ground etchings on his return to London in May, though they were not finally published until after his death, with the addition of aquatint to create tones similar to those in his watercolours. The brief cessation of hostilities between Britain and France, known as the Peace of Amiens, attracted thousands of British visitors to Paris, and so Girtin’s prints were targeted at a tourist audience keen for souvenirs of their trip and who prized carefully rendered details of the city’s buildings and inhabitants. To ensure such fidelity, Girtin appears to have employed a camera obscura for about half of the pencil drawings, and the modest size of this instrument required him to use small pieces of paper from which he assembled his mostly panoramic images of the scenery along the river Seine. All but one of the supports used by Girtin in the twenty-one Paris sketches he produced has been identified by the paper historian Peter Bower as the same 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 it may have been made up to twenty years earlier. 

Girtin’s soft-ground etching (see the print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 17 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, though none seem to have survived in this case. 

Girtin’s drawing, looking north west from the Arsenal, is the first of the Paris prints to show a view downriver, and it is unusual for the number of inscriptions that were added. These are primarily colour notes, leading one to wonder whether this might have been one of the first drawings to be executed after the artist abandoned his initial practice of making coloured sketches on the spot. Between the creation of the drawing and the production of the print, there was also a change of mind, with the artist extending the shoreline to the right to include a detail of a working barge and excluding some of the buildings to the left. The latter were then included in the next scene, plate twelve, which, if joined with this sheet, creates an extended panoramic view covering almost two hundred degrees (see print after TG1879b) that neatly contrasts the old and the new, the medieval cathedral of Notre Dame and the Panthéon in the Neoclassical style. There are two other examples of where plates can be joined together to form extended views – plates six and seventeen (see prints after TG1871a and TG1885a), and the unused drawing The Champ de Mars Seen from the Trocadéro (TG1888) and plate five (TG1868a). All of this suggested to Allan Halliday that the Paris prints had their origin, to some degree at least, in an aborted plan to produce a panorama of the French capital that might match the Eidometropolis (Halliday, 1983, pp.295–96). 

1802

The Pont de la Tournelle and Notre Dame, Taken from the Arsenal: Colour Study for Plate Eleven of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1878a

1802

The Panthéon, from the Arsenal, Looking across the Seine: Colour Study for Plate Twelve of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1879b

1802

The Tuileries Palace and the Pont Royal, Taken from the Pont de la Concorde: Colour Study for Plate Six of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1871a

1802

The Village of Chaillot, Taken from the Pont de la Concorde: Colour Study for Plate Seventeen of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1885a

1802

The Champ de Mars Seen from the Trocadéro, with Sèvres in the Distance: Unused Pencil Study for ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1888

1802

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

TG1868a