Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Dress

Dated 1652 and painted on copper at the National Gallery of Ireland, this portrait of a woman in blue dress was produced at the midpoint of Coques's career, when his technical mastery of copper was fully developed and his reputation as Antwerp's foremost portrait painter on small formats was firmly established. The National Gallery of Ireland's collection of Flemish masters, though smaller than British equivalents, holds several choice examples of seventeenth-century portraiture acquired through the Milltown gift and subsequent purchases. Blue dress portraits by Coques demonstrate his commitment to the most demanding chromatic challenge in the Flemish portrait tradition — modelling rich textile colour while preserving the warmth and luminosity of flesh tones in the same composition.

Like the companion blue satin portrait of 1662 at Cannon Hall, this work exploits copper's reflective backing to deepen the blue dress glazes to an intensity unavailable on canvas. Coques coordinates the colour temperature carefully: warm golden or reddish-brown underpainting in flesh areas contrasts with the cool blue superstructure of the dress, producing the chromatic vitality that made his copper portraits so sought after.