Hercules killing the Dragon in the Garden of the Hesperides

On 22 June 1639 the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, governing Flanders, wrote to his brother Philip IV in Madrid: the paintings for the vaulted rooms of the palace will be done as Your Majesty commands. Their letters are why we know what this canvas was for. It belongs to a set of 18 pictures ordered for the cool ground-floor apartment of the Alcázar where the king retreated in the heat, eight large hunting scenes and ten smaller ones on the labours of Hercules. The subject here is the garden of the Hesperides, whose trees grew golden apples and whose guardian was the dragon Ladon; Hercules is swinging his club at it, with a garden of planted beds and a line of trees running back behind. The letters even record how the work was shared: of one the figures and landscapes, of the other the animals, the second hand being almost certainly Frans Snyders, though here the dragon seems to be without him. The set was finished around 1640 and shipped to Spain the following year. The museum catalogues the canvas as Rubens and workshop, and dates it between 1635 and 1640.