This panoramic view of Paris from Chaillot, looking upriver with the dome of Les Invalides prominent to the right, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate five of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see the print after TG1868a). 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 (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. 

Girtin’s soft-ground etching (see print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 4 October 1802. To create this autograph print, the artist first traced his own drawing, reversing the image in the process, though this stage has not survived, 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, given that one impression for this scene (see figure 1) differs slightly from the finished etching, it is likely that there was a problem with the plate and that the artist had to redo it. Martin Hardie, in his unpublished manuscript notes on the Paris prints, suggests that it ‘was underbitten in some parts and overbitten in others’ and that a ‘second plate was etched’ in consequence (Girtin Archive, 37). 

The view from the village of Chaillot, near the present-day Trocadéro and opposite the Eiffel Tower, is one of Girtin’s most extended views, though the etching actually omits part of the drawing to the right. Another drawing taken from the same spot, showing the Champ de Mars (TG1888), would have completed a 120-degree vista of the city if it too had been used for a print. Moving away from the centre of Paris for the first time, the artist chose an elevated position on the north bank of the river, dispensing with a viewpoint on a bridge that he typically used elsewhere – though water was still the dominant feature of the foreground in a publication that might, more accurately, have been titled Views of the Seine. The resultant panoramic view, with the dome of Les Invalides prominent to the right, was thought to be characteristic enough of Paris to feature as one of the sets to Thomas Dibdin’s (1771–1841) comic pantomime Wizard’s Wake; or, Harlequin’s Regeneration, which opened at the New Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, on 30 August 1802. The playbill lists the set for scene three as a ‘Panorama View of Paris, taken from the village Chaillot’ (Dibdin, 1802). Though it is not credited to Girtin, it is highly likely that, as with two other Paris views used by the same author for another pantomime (plates nine and ten: see prints after TG1876 and TG1877), it too was made from the artist’s drawing, not least because both the etching and the aquatint were published after the production’s opening.

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

1802

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

TG1888

1802

The Pont au Change, the Théâtre de la Cité, the Pont Neuf and the Conciergerie Prison, Taken from the Pont Notre Dame: Pencil Study for Plate Nine of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1876

1802

The Porte Saint-Denis, Viewed from the Suburbs: Possible Study for Plate Ten of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1877