Venus Trying to Restrain Adonis from Departing for the Hunt

In Ovid's telling, Venus warns Adonis about wild beasts and then drives off in her chariot, and the young hunter goes out alone and is killed by a boar. The moment painted here, with the goddess holding on to him as he pulls away toward the hunt, is not in the poem. Titian invented it in the 1550s, in a picture for Philip II of Spain, and it was copied and adapted many times. Rubens, who studied Titian closely, took up the subject in his own compositions.

This panel repeats one of them. The Mauritshuis, which owns it and shows it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague, calls it a copy from Rubens's studio and dates it no more closely than 1600 to 1700. It may have been painted in his lifetime or long after his death in 1640, and the copyist is not known.