This view of the Ile de la Cité, with the twin towers of Notre Dame to the left, was taken from the Pont Marie and was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate three of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1865b). 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, 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 the print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 25 June 1802. To create this autograph print, the artist first traced his own drawing, reversing the image in the process, though this 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. The impression that has survived for this print includes changes marked by Girtin in red chalk (see figure 1), notably on the roofs of the buildings to the right, on the towers of Notre Dame to the left and on the barges on the water. 

It is not surprising that Girtin made corrections to his proof because this is one of the most complex of his compositions, depicting a bustling working scene along the banks of the river. From a high position on the east end of the Pont Marie, the view north west includes a large area of the quay, whilst the Louvre, mentioned in the title, is barely visible in the distance, and Notre Dame, to the left, is little clearer. Visitors to Paris were not always convinced by the picturesque merits of the river Seine, with John Carr (1723–1807), for instance, complaining that the river was ‘narrow, and very dirty’ and that the shore was ‘sadly disfigured by a number of black, gloomy, and unwieldy sheds, which are erected upon barges, for the accommodation of washerwomen’ (Carr, 1803, p.97). For Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), who accompanied Girtin on his travels around the environs of the city and who may even have had the prints in front of him as he wrote about his more positive experience of Paris, the same view was alive with ‘motion and activity’. The ‘river is loaded with pretty inland craft’, he wrote, ‘with charcoal carriers, and with the dirty barges in which many hundred washer-women are all day beating, dabbling, and brush-scrubbing their linen’ (Holcroft, 1804, vol.1, p.179). Although the washerwomen are not distinguishable in Girtin’s view, there is no doubt that he shared Holcroft’s interest in the city as an aggregate of the myriad people who lived and worked there, and not just as a collection of venerable buildings.

1802

The Ile de la Cité, with the Louvre and the Pont Neuf in the Distance, Taken from the Pont Marie: Colour Study for Plate Three of ‘Picturesque Views in Paris’

TG1865b