Loosely based on a passage from John Milton's 1634 masque Comus, it shows a nude Venus leaning across to wake the sleeping Love by stroking his wings.

While Etty often included nude figures in his work, he rarely depicted physical intimacy, and owing to this, The Dawn of Love is one of his more unusual paintings.

The open sensuality of the work was intended to present a challenge to the viewer mirroring the plot of Comus, in which the heroine is tempted by desire but remains rational and detached.

[10] Following the exhibition of Cleopatra, over the next decade Etty tried to replicate its success by painting nude figures in biblical, literary and mythological settings.

[14][A] And on the tawny sands and shelves Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves By dimpled brook and fountain-brim The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim Their merry wakes and pastimes keep; What hath night to do with sleep?

Instead, it is inspired by an early passage in which Comus, prior to his meeting with The Lady, muses on the notion that sin is only problematic if others become aware of it, and thus that it is right and natural to surrender to base desires while under cover of darkness, arguing that "What hath night to do with sleep?

By his open depiction of nudity and sensuality, Etty makes the same argument as that presented by Comus, that it is rational for the viewer to succumb to their lustful thoughts while in private.

[17] The Times commented that "the drawing is free and flowing" and "the colouring, though rich, is perfectly natural", but felt that "the subject is, however, handled in a way entirely too luscious (we might, with great propriety, use a harsher term) for the public eye".

[24] The harshest criticism came from an anonymous reviewer in The London Magazine: This small picture ... we utterly condemn, not for the nudity or indecency of which some have complained, but because there is a total want of beauty, grace, and expression, to clothe the nakedness and abstract the mind from it.

His firm, broad, manly pencil, requires wider scope and a different subject.An anonymous reviewer in the same publication later that year returned to the theme, chiding Etty for his imitation of foreign artists rather than attempting to develop a new and unique style of his own, observing that "we cannot imitate the voice or the actions of another, without exaggerating or caricaturing them", complaining that there is "[no] propriety in seeing the Venuses of Titian, the fables of heathenism, or the base occupations of Dutch boors, placed in parallel with those subjects which form the basis [of] all our future hopes", and observing that "surely, Rubens ought here [in England] to be held up as rock to avoid, not a light to follow".

[26] In February 1828, shortly after the exhibition of The Dawn of Love, Etty defeated John Constable by 18 votes to five to become a full Royal Academician,[27] at the time the highest honour available to an artist.

[28][B] From 1832 onwards, needled by repeated attacks from the press on his supposed indecency and tastelessness, Etty continued to be a prominent painter of nudes but began to make conscious efforts to reflect moral teachings in his work.