This view of the Panthéon, viewed from the Arsenal looking across the river Seine, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate twelve of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1879b). 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. 

The drawing in this case actually only covers the left half of the print, and Girtin must have assembled his composition from three sources: this sheet, the discarded portion of the outline study for plate eleven (TG1878) and another pencil sketch that includes part of a foreground that was not used in the final print (TG1880). The inclusion of the section of the left bank from the previous scene, plate eleven (see print after TG1878a), means that the two sheets can be joined together to create an extended panoramic view, covering almost two hundred degrees, thereby neatly contrasting the new and the old, the Panthéon in the Neoclassical style and the medieval cathedral of Notre Dame. 

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. 

1802

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

TG1879b

1802

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

TG1878

1802

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

TG1880

1802

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

TG1878a