Friday 11 July 2025
5.30 - 7pm

Join us for this special evening tour and talk led by Dr Christina Bradstreet, curator of the exhibition and author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914.

In G. F. Watts’s iconic painting Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’) the Victorian actress Ellen Terry is shown choosing between the luscious, cultivated camellia pressed to her nose and the humble, sweet-smelling wild violets clutched to her heart. The painting is the artist’s private commemoration of the choice Terry had recently made between a flamboyant, superficial life on the stage and a comparatively sheltered life of domestic decency as Watts’s first wife and muse.

Join guest curator Christina Bradstreet to discover how Watts drew on the Victorian language of flowers, contemporary ideas about scented and unscented flowers, as popular perceptions of the visual and the olfactory in the hierarchy of the senses to create this highly nuanced painting and deceptively simple-looking, exquisite painting.

There will be an opportunity for an exclusive view of Scented Visions with Christina before the talk to view G.F. Watts’s, ‘Choosing’ and other works.

Light refreshments will be served.

Dr. Christina Bradstreet

Dr. Christina Bradstreet is an art historian specialising in Victorian art. She is Head of Programmes at the Association for Art History. Her book Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 was published by Penn State University Press in September 2022.

“Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian Aesthetic paintings are so often described as ‘multisensory’, but smell and its significance has been overlooked, despite being ‘under our noses’ all along. Many 19th - and early 20th-century ideas about smell and smelling, such as the belief that smell is disease or that rainbows emanate the sweet scent of fresh, wet meadows after a rainstorm, seem outlandish today. Yet this contextual information lends a new and vital perspective for understanding some of the most iconic Victorian paintings.”