You Can Actually Smell the Incense, Rainy Meadows and Musty Cloth in These Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

Visitors to a new exhibition in England will not only be able to look upon painted scenes and characters: They’ll be able to smell them, too.

“Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites,” which is on display at the University of Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts, focuses on paintings made in the 19th and early-20th centuries. These works are part of the Aesthetic and pre-Raphaelite movements—which rejected conventions such as genre painting and reverence for artists like the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, opting instead to portray nature and beauty.

According to the museum, fragrance was often “visually suggested” in paintings from these movements, in the form of, for instance, a person smelling flowers or burning incense. Artists included such details to enhance paintings’ “sensory aura,” portray hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) or evoke particular moods and emotions.

“While pre-Raphaelite painting (in its broadest definition) is beloved for its sensuous beauty, including exquisite colors, textures and allusions to music, the olfactory aspects of these works have long been overlooked,” writes exhibition curator Christina Bradstreet, author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914, on the Barber Institute’s website.

One common motif in Victorian painting was a subject smelling flowers, Bradstreet adds. For example, an 1864 portrait by George Frederic Watts shows a young woman pressing a red bloom to her face, “eyes closed, lost in reverie.” Other paintings evoke less pleasant smells, like the burning foliage of John Everett Millais’ Autumn Leaves (1856).

In the exhibition, two artworks are flanked by diffusers, which visitors can trigger by pressing a button, according to the Spectator’s Melanie McDonagh. Simeon Solomon’s portrait of a haloed clergyman, A Saint of the Eastern Church (1868), is accompanied by the fragrance of incense and wood, replicating the scented smoke wafting from the subject’s incense burner.

Meanwhile, Millais’ The Blind Girl (1856) depicts a young woman and her younger sister sitting in a lush meadow, two rainbows curved across the sky behind them. “Although she is unable to see the stunning environment in which she finds herself, she can still rely on her other senses, including smell,” writes Artnet’s Tim Brinkhof. As such, the painting is accompanied by two diffusers, one evoking the girls’ clothing and the other their natural surroundings.

The Blind Girl is “a painting about sight, blindness and spiritual vision,” Bradstreet tells the Observer’s Dalya Alberge. “The girl’s quiet stillness suggests a heightened alertness to the scents and sounds that we imagine coming from the meadow.”

The Barber Institute collaborated with art curation company Artphilia and Spanish perfumer Puig, which created the diffusers and scents on display in “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites.” For The Blind Girl, the show’s lead work, Puig made two scents.

“The first captures the rain-soaked pasture, combining the aromas of freshly cut grass, bright spring flowers and other vegetation with those of damp earth and ditch water,” as Artphilia founder Antje Kiewell tells the Observer. “A second Puig scent aims to bring to life the experience of the younger sibling, with the lower half of her face half-buried in her sister’s rain-dampened, musty, yet comforting, shawl.”

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In recent years, other museums have staged similar scent-focused displays. In 2022, Madrid’s Prado Museum installed floral and vegetal fragrances beside The Sense of Smell, a 1618 painting by Flemish artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. The Prado discovered that while visitors usually spend around 32 seconds before a painting, they remained in front of The Sense of Smell for roughly 13 minutes.

“It’s an experiment to see if scents can bring these paintings to life, enhancing people’s understanding of the painting,” Bradstreet tells the Observer. “It’s not just seeing the visual details. We want people to take a long, slow look at the paintings, smell the scents and perhaps imagine themselves there in the scene.”

“Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” is on view at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts through January 26, 2025.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.