This view of the watermill near the old bridge at Charenton on the river Marne, east of Paris, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate nineteen of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1890a). 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 with great ‘dispatch’. Holcroft noted that the ‘village of Charenton is beautifully situated at the junction of two rivers; the Marne and the Seine’ and, given that ‘the views round it are many of them excellent, for the landscape painter: water, foliage, buildings, and mills [and] One or two of these views Girtin has preserved’ (Holcroft, 1804, vol.2, p.490). As this sketch indicates, Girtin 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, though in this case none seem to have survived.

1802

The Watermill above the Bridge at Charenton: Colour Study for Plate Nineteen of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1890a