Poort met torens en toegangsbrug 1830

Jean Coucke made this etching of a towered gate and access bridge sometime around the first half of the 19th century. It presents a medieval scene of fortified entry, a gatehouse that would have controlled who and what had access to the town or castle beyond. Coucke was working in Belgium at a time when the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had challenged old aristocratic power structures. Consider that the dominant artistic style of the time was Romanticism, and that the art world had begun to embrace the aesthetic idea of the ‘sublime,’ in which the vastness and power of nature and history were brought to the fore. Coucke’s choice of subject may reflect a conservative nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past, a time when social hierarchies were more rigidly defined and visually represented by structures such as this fortified gate. To better understand Coucke’s work, we might research the history of Belgian architectural styles and the socio-political context of Belgium during the early 19th century.