Porte Saint-Denis, Paris

Jules de Bruycker was a Belgian painter, draftsman, and printmaker noted for his highly detailed drawings, watercolors, and prints documenting the lives of the working class and urban poor, especially those living in the older sections of his home city of Ghent. In the present example, De Bruycker portrays the Gate of St. Denis, a seventeenth-century triumphal arch built for King Louis XIV, as it appeared in 1928. Though the triumphal arch dominates the composition, the artist included many details of the surrounding Paris streetscape, including the hodge-podge of shops and crowds of people going about their daily lives in the shadow of the grand monument.