The Discovery of Purple

The story comes from Julius Pollux, a Greek writer of the 2nd century, and it is not an obvious subject for a hunting lodge. Hercules is walking on the beach at Tyre when his dog bites into a sea snail and comes back with its mouth stained a deep red-purple. That accident, in the telling, is how Tyrian purple was found, the dye that rulers in antiquity kept for themselves. Van Thulden painted the canvas between 1636 and 1638 for the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge Philip IV kept outside Madrid, working from a small oil sketch by Rubens that is now in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne. He signed it at the lower left, T. V. Thulden. The picture still belongs to the Prado, but it has not hung in Madrid since 2017: it is on long-term deposit at the fine arts museum in A Coruña.