Cupid on a dolphin

Almost every picture painted for the lodge illustrates a text. This one does not. A child Cupid rides a dolphin across an almost square canvas, and Svetlana Alpers, going through the commission piece by piece, could find no episode behind it and no clear reason for the choice. She wondered whether it was meant to pair with another Quellinus canvas, the sleeping Cupid that has since been cut down. What Cupid does have in that house is influence. His arrows are why most of the stories on those walls happen at all, the Rape of Proserpina, Apollo chasing Daphne, and he is almost never in the pictures himself. Here he is the whole subject. Erasmus Quellinus painted it between 1636 and 1638 from a sketch by Rubens now in Brussels, and Alpers noticed that the canvas has been extended along its left side.