A nude goddess stands upright on a scallop shell at the center, her arms raised to wring out her long hair. Around her, nymphs and tritons crowd in the surf, two of the tritons blowing conch shells, a small cupid rides a dolphin at the lower right, and a swarm of cupids tumbles through soft clouds above. The subject is Venus, the Roman goddess of love, born from the sea; the Orsay's record indexes the picture with Cupid, a dolphin, a centaur and a triton. William-Adolphe Bouguereau showed this huge canvas, three meters tall, at the Paris Salon of 1879, where it was catalog no.

376. The French state bought it from the artist the same year for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of living artists. The Orsay also holds Alexandre Cabanel's earlier Birth of Venus, which the museum says was one of the great successes of the 1863 Salon, where Napoleon III bought it; the subject was a Salon favorite. It is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.