The Apotheosis of Hercules (sketch for Torre de la Parada)

Late in 1636 Philip IV of Spain asked Rubens for more than 60 mythological pictures, most of them drawn from Ovid, to fill a hunting lodge in the woods outside Madrid called the Torre de la Parada. Rubens was 59 and gout had begun to cripple his hands. He took the commission and delivered inside about 18 months by splitting the work in two. He painted the small oil sketches himself, fast, and passed them to colleagues in Antwerp to enlarge onto full-size canvas. This is one of those sketches, Hercules being carried up to join the gods. The lodge was wrecked in the following century and a good part of the cycle went with it. The large Hercules survived. Jan Cossiers, one of the painters working to Rubens's designs, made it, and it is in the Prado.