Vénus et Adonis. Paysage de Grottaferrata (right half of Venus and Adonis)

Poussin painted this landscape fragment — identified as the right half of a larger Venus and Adonis composition — around 1625–26, depicting a wooded pastoral landscape near Grottaferrata south of Rome. The small panel demonstrates his early interest in landscape as an independent subject or compositional element, before the full classical landscape style of his mature period. The warm, Venetian-inflected light filtering through the trees and the soft atmospheric distance show his engagement with the landscape tradition of Giorgione and Titian, which he knew through the Roman collections he studied. This early attention to landscape as a vehicle for atmospheric and sensuous beauty would develop into the great classical landscape compositions of his final decades.

The surviving fragment shows Poussin's early approach to integrating mythological figures within a naturalistic landscape, with the warm greens and golden light characteristic of his youthful, Venetian-influenced manner.