Venus and Adonis was one of a small group of figurative paintings that Streeton painted on classical themes. In 1898 he had made a chalk drawing of this subject and — when he visited Paris for a week in October 1901 — he wrote to Tom Roberts that in conceiving this work he had been inspired by works in the Louvre by Giorgione, Titian, Poussin, Claude and Tintoretto.  (Galbally and Gray, 1989)