Etching of Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris, France

This etching of Paris’s famous Notre-Dame Cathedral memorializes an architectural sight Charles saw on his first honeymoon, which he sketched and then printed along with views of the Schocken department store in Stuttgart and the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in Normandy. Rather than depict the magnificent building in full, however, Charles chose to show it at a distance with the cathedral’s double square towers and spire peeking out from behind a row of houses along the Seine. Charles would have stood on the opposite side of the river, to the south of the cathedral, to sketch this view. Like in his image of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey, another medieval church built on an island, Charles attends to the mixture of architectural styles visible from one vantage point and describes the edge of the city island, which drops off steeply where the land meets the water.