Girtin’s soft-ground etching (see the print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 16 June 1802. To create this autograph print, the artist would have 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, and one such print survives for this work, with the artist adding a flag in pencil as well as notes to himself: ‘down’; ‘col this down’ (see figure 2).
It is not known in what order Girtin produced his drawings for the twenty Picturesque Views in Paris, but there was a logic in publishing this as plate one given the interest amongst British visitors to the city in everything to do with Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). The Tuileries Palace, located between the two arms of the Louvre, was then home to the First Consul, and the view from the Quai d’Orsay gives a sense of the grandeur of Napoleon’s ambitions, though other British visitors may have concentrated on it as the site of the arrest of the French royal family in August 1792 at the hands of a ‘lawless mob’ (Eyre, 1803, p.69). The palace was demolished in 1871 after being set alight during the Paris Commune. The south bank of the Seine is unusually quiet in Girtin’s drawing, suggesting that the view might have been taken on a Sunday, when the barges were moored up along the riverbank. For visitors such as the actor and dramatist Edmund John Eyre (1767–1816), the river Seine, even in the vicinity of the Louvre, was ‘inferior to the Thames’, being ‘muddy, and ungrateful to the eye’ as ‘neither its depth, nor breadth will allow ships of burthen to approach its banks’ (Eyre, 1803, p.82).
1802
The Tuileries Palace and the Pont Royal, Taken from the Quai d’Orsay: Colour Study for Plate One of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’
TG1862b
1802
The Tuileries Palace and the Pont Royal, Taken from the Quai d’Orsay: Pencil Study for Plate One of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’
TG1862a
About this Work
This view of the Tuileries Palace and the Pont Royal, taken looking across the river Seine from the Quai d’Orsay, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate one of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1862b). Frustrated in his attempt to show his London panorama in Paris, Girtin took up the suggestion of his patron Sir George 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 (see print after TG1862a), though they were not finally published until after his death, with the addition of aquatint to create tones similar to those in a monochrome sketch (Hardie, 1966–68, vol.2, p.8; Smith, 2017–18, pp.32–35). 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.