Paysage au dieu fleuve. Paysage de Grottaferrata (left half of Venus and Adonis)

Landscape with River God from around 1625 at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier is a fragment of a larger composition of Venus and Adonis, separated at some point in its history and now constituting an independent work. The reclining river deity — a classical personification of a specific body of water, shown as an old man resting beside his stream — was a standard feature of Poussin's early mythological landscapes, drawn from his close study of ancient Roman sculpture where such personifications were ubiquitous. His mythological subjects drew on deep reading of Ovid, Virgil, and Philostratus, and his treatment of river gods and nymphs reflects this learning put to visual use in compositions where every figure carried specific classical meaning. The Musée Fabre in Montpellier, one of France's major regional collections with particularly strong holdings in seventeenth-century French painting, preserves this fragment as documentation of Poussin's early mythological landscape practice.

The reclining figure is integrated into a verdant landscape setting. Poussin's handling of the mythological figure within nature demonstrates his developing approach to the classical landscape.