WMR gives two different dates for the sonnet's composition: 1865 (in 1911) and 1868 (in ). The latter is correct. In fact, WMR's diary for 16 January 1868 records the composition of the sonnet (see WMR, , 296 ). The earliest known text is the Ashley Library manuscript, which dates from 1868.

DGR revised the sonnet in small but important ways after both its first (1868) and its second (1870) printings..

DGR made his first study for the picture in 1863. He worked on the painting in 1864, and completed it in 1869, when it was sent to John Mitchell of Bradford, who had commissioned it.

For detailed commentary see the editorial notes for the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery oil.

The work (both poem and picture) gained some public presence right away because of Swinburne's review of both in the 1868 (pages 49-50 ).

The fact that this figure of Venus incorporates both Uranian and Pandemian features is emphasized in the way the sonnet comes in the 1868 . It is the third sonnet printed there, mediating (as it were) between the other two ( and ). Also relevant is this comment DGR made to Madox Brown at the end of a letter DGR wrote on 23 August 1864: “What do you think of putting a nimbus behind my Venus's head? I believe the Greeks used to do it” ( Fredeman, , 64. 118 ).

The sonnet was first printed as part of Swinburne's review in the 1868 49 . There it bore the title . DGR had this text set in type in August 1869 for the Penkill Proofs of what would eventually be published as the 1870 . There it appeared under the title . The sonnet was then re-collected in the 1881 with the original title restored.

This painting marks an important moment in DGR's work, in several ways. Whereas the painter was enthusiastic about the work, Ruskin was appalled, and his dislike marks the moment of their estrangement (see Doughty, , 326-329 and WMR, 132-145 ). Ruskin saw the painting as “coarse” both in execution and, most particularly, in moral vision. He was aware that the work represented DGR's conscious effort to paint in a Venetian manner, and hence to make a radical shift away from his primitivist styles. But while he professed to admire the style and technique of Titian and Correggio, “you are not on the way to Correggio,” he told DGR; “And you are, it seems, under the (for the present) fatal mistake of thinking that you will ever learn to paint well by painting badly, i.e., coarsely” (see WMR, , 135 ).

DGR was understandably put off by Ruskin's presumptuous attitude. But the more important issue is not personal, it is artistic. This painting and its associated works (e.g., , , , , and ) define the shift that DGR's pictorial work undergoes through the course of the 1860s. DGR not only works predominantly in oils, rather than in watercolours, he concentrates on a more rich and even voluptuous expression, and plunges into a series of studies of female portraits that amount to a complex study of the idea of Venus.

An index of the powerful ambiguity at work in the painting and the poem is found in the model DGR chose for his Venus. Initially this was “a very large young woman, almost a giantess,” whom DGR “noticed in the street” (see Surtees, I. 99 ). That was in 1864. In 1867 DGR repainted the head, and this time Alexa Wilding was the model. The substitution of Wilding, whom he used for idealized figures, in place of the cook he found in the street, glosses the character of the ambiguous work that DGR was trying to realize.

Like Tennyson earlier, DGR read the myth of Troy as a prophetic allegory that bore ominous contemporary political meanings. The sonnet's placement in the 1870 emphasizes its political significance: it forms a group with , , and .

Agosta, 93-94 Gregory, II. 116 Sharp, , 204-207 Surtees, I. 98-100 (no. 173) WMR and Swinburne, , 47. , [Tate 1997] 152-153.