A drawing of a bowered garden, with (l-r) Ajax falling on his sword; Clytia looking up at the sun; Narcissus gazing at his reflection with Echo by him; Flora holding her skirts and dancing, with putti, Hyacinthus holding his wounded head; Adonis showing his thigh, his dogs by his side; Crocus and Smylax. In the sky is Apollo in the chariot of the sun.

The drawing is a large, carefully finished version of a composition by Poussin, known in a preparatory drawing by the artist (RCIN 911983, q.v.), with which the present sheet corresponds in most details, and in a painting in Dresden.

The drawing is one of a group of three large illustrations of mythological transformations into natural objects - the others are Perseus and Andromeda: The origin of coral (RCIN 911879, itself based on an original drawing by Poussin, 911984); and Venus and Adonis Hunting: The Colouring of the Rose (911877, with no known prototype by Poussin). All of these compositions were described by Bellori (Le Vite de PittoriI, 1672, pp. 441-3), and all three were presumably devised by Poussin at the same time, around 1627. The three carefully finished versions of the compositions probably came from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, whose wide-ranging and erudite interest in antiquity and natural history is well known, and who was at this time beginning to assemble his enormous "Paper Museum", the bulk of which is now also at Windsor. Cassiano was one of Poussin's most supportive patrons in his early years, and nothing would be more natural than for him to commission from the young artist a set of finished drawings of what might be termed "mythological natural history".

This set of drawings may perhaps be connected with those mentioned in a letter from Poussin to Cassiano, undated but probably of 1627. Having referred to the composition of Hannibal on an elephant (Fogg Art Museum) that he was painting for Cassiano, Poussin wrote: "As to your drawings, I think of them every day, and soon I will finish something." This has been taken to refer to drawings after the antique for Cassiano's paper museum, but there is no hard evidence that Poussin contributed any such drawings, and it may be that the drawings of which he writes were finished figural compositions. But the three large finished drawings (RCIN 911877-9) are not by Poussin. They are usually described simply as copies, and stylistically they are unlike anything certainly by Poussin known to us, with each line slowly and carefully drawn, and shaded with a combination of wash and fine parallel hatching replicating the effect of an engraving. Perhaps they are copies made for Cassiano by one of his stable of young draughtsmen, from originals, now lost, in his own collection; it is unlikely we will ever know.