This view of the village of Chaillot and the left bank of the river Seine, taken from the Pont de la Concorde, was drawn on the spot by Girtin early in 1802 in preparation for plate seventeen of his Picturesque Views in Paris (see print after TG1885a). 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 (see print after TG1885), 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.

The supports for the Paris sketches have been identified by the paper historian Peter Bower as 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 manufactured twenty years earlier. In this case, however, in what appears to have been the result of a change of mind, the artist added a smaller piece of an entirely different support, a white wove writing paper, probably made by James Whatman the Younger (1741–98), which he presumably brought with him from Britain. It is unclear why Girtin did this, omitting in the process the prominent seated figure that appears in the final print, though it may have been in order to exclude the two prominent barges that appear in the foreground of one of the colour studies that Girtin made for the final aquatint (see TG1885a figure 1). Incidentally, the seated man in a hat also appears in reverse in a sheet of figure studies that may have been copied from Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716–1803) (TG1900), and he certainly does not seem to have been sketched on the spot.

The view from the recently completed Pont de la Concorde is one of two from the bridge, which, joined together, make up an almost complete panoramic scene (the other being TG1871). The bridge, which connects the Place de la Concorde and the Quai d’Orsay (on the left bank), provided Girtin with a view to the right of Chaillot, which was then a village outside the city but is now dominated by the Eiffel Tower. The prominent tower on the opposite bank of the Seine is the Pompe à Feu du Gros-Caillou, built in 1788 to supply water to the area, though it has not been possible to identify the colonnade to its left; could it be a temporary structure associated with the French Revolution?

Girtin’s soft-ground etching (see the print after, above) was published separately from the finished aquatint, on 28 June 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, and in this case two have survived. One, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see figure 2), is marked with a series of sometimes obscure notes in pencil, including ‘Wrong. Long tuch it’ and ‘no line in the middle’. Martin Hardie, in his unpublished account of the Paris prints in the Girtin Archive (37), suggests that this is evidence that the plate was ‘underbitten’ and that it was consequently put aside and replaced by another. The proof from the second plate, now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (see figure 3), was also once heavily annotated, though most of the inscriptions have been rubbed out, leaving a few stray words behind: ‘The white …’ in the sky and ‘On the whole …’ in the water.