Apollo as Victor over Pan (sketch for the Torre de la Parada)

In 1636 Philip IV ordered close to 60 mythological scenes for the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge in the oak woods outside Madrid. Rubens was in his late fifties by then and often laid up with gout, so he worked each composition out himself on a small panel like this one and left the full-size canvases to other Antwerp painters. The subject comes from Ovid. Pan has challenged Apollo to a music contest, the mountain god Tmolus has awarded it to Apollo, and King Midas objects, which is how he ends up with donkey ears. Jacob Jordaens enlarged this design to about two metres by three. Velázquez's son-in-law Mazo later copied Jordaens, and that copy is one of the two paintings hanging on the back wall of Las Meninas.