Portret van een jonge man

Also dated 1649 and housed at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh alongside the companion portrait of a boy, this portrait of a young man represents Coques working at the height of his early mature period. Young men of prosperous Antwerp families were frequently portrayed in their late teens or early twenties — an age at which they were entering trade, embarking on the Grand Tour equivalent, or taking up professional training. The Museum Mayer van den Bergh's core collection was assembled by the nineteenth-century Antwerp collector Fritz Mayer van den Bergh, and its concentration of local Flemish material makes it a natural home for two Coques portraits from the same year. The Dutch title 'Portret van een jonge man' echoes the neutral identification of countless similar works across the Flemish and Dutch traditions where sitters' names were not preserved with the object.

Oil on canvas at this date shows Coques handling a medium he used less frequently than copper or panel for intimate male portraits. The canvas texture is absorbed into the paint film through careful priming, producing a surface smooth enough for the fine facial modelling Coques preferred, while the larger canvas format permits a slightly broader treatment of the background than copper panels allowed.