Old man with an hourglass.

Dated 1700 — when Coques would have been in his late eighties if the date is accurate, making this potentially among his very last works, or alternatively a posthumous workshop piece — this old man with an hourglass at the National Museum in Warsaw is an unusual departure from the artist's social portrait specialisation into the realm of allegorical or moralising imagery. The hourglass was among the most potent memento mori symbols in seventeenth-century painting, representing the inexorable passage of time toward death. An aged sitter holding such an object creates a doubly weighted image: the visual fact of physical decline reinforced by the object's symbolic message. Whether this represents an actual identifiable sitter using the hourglass as a personal attribute, or a generic type figure like those painted by northern contemporaries in the vanitas tradition, remains open. The Warsaw holding reflects the historical dispersal of Flemish painting across central Europe.

The old man's aged face — deeply lined, spare of flesh — requires the most demanding kind of portrait modelling, where value contrasts must describe bone structure visible beneath thinned skin. Coques applies warm glazes in shadow areas and cooler whites in highlights to capture the particular quality of aged complexion, contrasted against the hourglass's cool glass and metal.