Sight (Portrait of Robert van den Hoecke)

This 1661 portrait pairs a subject — the military artist Robert van den Hoecke — with the allegorical attribute of Sight, creating a hybrid work that merges individual portraiture with the Five Senses series. Van den Hoecke (1622–1668) was himself a painter and draughtsman known for military subjects and architectural views, making him an especially apt sitter for an allegory about vision: a man whose profession depended on trained, disciplined looking. Coques and van den Hoecke moved in overlapping Antwerp artistic circles, and this portrait captures a moment of mutual professional recognition between painters. The National Gallery holds this work as part of its collection of seventeenth-century Flemish portraiture. The conceit of naming the sitter and linking him to the sense of Sight transforms what might be a conventional portrait into a meditation on the relationship between professional identity and perceptual acuity. The date of 1661 places it squarely in Coques's most productive decade.

Oil on panel with the refined finish Coques reserved for his finest portrait commissions. The sitter is depicted with individualised facial features that distinguish this from a generic allegorical figure. Attributes associated with Sight — optical instruments, drawings, or possibly a small painting — are rendered with still-life precision. The warm but controlled interior lighting is consistent with Coques's indoor portrait settings of the period.