Self-Portrait of the Artist with his Wife Suzanne Cock and their Children

Self-Portrait of the Artist with his Wife Suzanne Cock and their Children, held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is one of the most personally revealing works in de Vos's oeuvre — a rare family self-portrait that documents the painter's own domestic life and relationship with his wife and children. Suzanne Cock was the sister of Jan Wildens, a landscape painter who worked with Rubens, connecting de Vos through family ties into the heart of the Antwerp Baroque circle. The self-portrait with family was a genre of considerable personal and professional significance: it demonstrated the painter's technical skill (portraiture was his métier), asserted his domestic stability and respectable bourgeois status, and created an intimate document for family transmission. De Vos had become a master of group portraits for other families; here he turned the same eye on his own. The Ashmolean Museum's collection is particularly strong in Flemish Baroque portraiture, and this work is among the museum's most humanly engaging holdings. The undated nature of the work suggests it may have been a personal rather than commissioned work, without the contractual precision of dated client portraits.

The group self-portrait format required de Vos to paint his own face — an intrinsically different challenge from observing a client — likely using a mirror for the self-image while painting the family members from direct observation. The compositional organization of a self-portrait group follows the same logic as his client family portraits, but with an added layer of artistic self-consciousness in the painter's own face.