The Execution of Charles I of England

Painted around 1650, shortly after the event it depicts, this canvas at the Musée de Picardie shows the execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 30 January 1649 — one of the most traumatic political events of the seventeenth century. The regicide shocked Catholic and Protestant Europe alike, and Flemish Antwerp — which had maintained close commercial ties with England — responded with a range of commemorative and propagandistic imagery. Coques's choice of this subject is striking given his usual specialism in intimate domestic portraiture; the history painting format required him to handle crowds, architecture, and dramatic narrative rather than the refined domestic spaces he typically commanded. The work may have been produced for an English royalist exile community on the continent, or for an Antwerp patron with royalist sympathies. The Banqueting House's Rubens ceiling — ironically commissioned by Charles himself — appears in contemporary views and may inform the architectural backdrop.

Managing a complex crowd scene tests Coques beyond his usual intimate register; he handles it by massing figures in middle ground while using the scaffold platform to create a clear focal point at the top of the compositional pyramid. The palette is sombre — greys, blacks, and cold blues dominate, appropriate to the subject's gravity — with the pale sky providing the only lightness.