Gonzales Coques

In his own Antwerp, Gonzales Coques was called 'the little van Dyck'. The name caught both what he borrowed and how small he worked. He painted portraits in the elegant manner of Anthony van Dyck, the great Flemish portraitist whose relaxed, silken sitters had set the fashion at courts across Europe, and he shrank them to the size of a cabinet panel.

Born in Antwerp between 1614 and 1618, he trained with local masters and married into a painting family, wedding the daughter of David Rijckaert, one of his presumed teachers. His small group portraits, with their carefully finished rooms and gardens behind the sitters, are sometimes credited as early conversation pieces, the informal family group that later English painters would take up.

His clients reached well above the Antwerp merchants who first hired him. He worked for John of Austria the Younger, a Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, and for the Elector of Brandenburg, and he dealt in other artists' pictures on the side.