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This exhibition originated at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, The University of Birmingham, 11 October 2024 – 26 January 2025.
Opening at Watts Gallery on 15 May (until 9 November), Scented Visions is the first exhibition to explore the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth and early twentieth-century art.
Featuring paintings by, amongst others, Anna Alma-Tadema (1867-1943), Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945), Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Evelyn de Morgan (1855-1919), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) and G F Watts (1817-1904), the exhibition examines how these artists conveyed scent in their art and how the ideas they held about smells and smelling informed their paintings in intriguing ways.
Thanks to the inclusion of AirParfum technology, these ideas are brought to life for the 21st century visitor through a multi-sensory experience. In partnership with Artphilia and the Spanish fashion and fragrance house Puig, bespoke fragrances have been created by Gregorio Sola, Senior Perfumer and Creative Director at Puig to accompany two paintings in the exhibition: The Blind Girl, 1856 (Birmingham Museums Trust) by John Everett Millais, and A Saint of the Eastern Church, 1867-68 (Birmingham Museums Trust) by Simeon Solomon.
Scented Visions opens with an exploration of the popular image of women smelling flowers. This motif conveys a range of meanings, from saintly purity to sexual abandon. Central to this section of the exhibition is G F Watts’s much-loved painting of his first wife, Ellen Terry (Choosing), 1864 (National Portrait Gallery), a pioneering example of this theme. In the painting, the actress Ellen Terry is portrayed in the process of choosing between the luscious, showy blooms of the unscented camellia pressed to her face, and the handful of sweet-smelling wild violets clutched to her heart. The painting alludes to the artist’s feelings about the choice (so recently made by Terry at the time of painting) between the temptations of a flamboyant life of vanity on stage and a comparatively innocent and simple life as Watts’s wife and muse.
On the adjacent wall, hangs John Frederick Lewis’s Lilium Auratum, 1871 (Birmingham Museums Trust), in which two women gather flowers for the home. The painting emphasises an ideal of female domesticity within an imagined Orientalised setting - the profusion of fragrant lilies and other blooms evoking a sense of exotic luxury and abundance.
‘Seeing Smell’ is the theme of the next section of the exhibition, exploring ways in which artists, scientists, popular writers, and cartoonists tried to see (give visual form to) invisible smell. Punch cartoons on display reveal how the desire to see smell was, in the 1850s, a fear-driven quest to better understand and control miasma (smell as disease). Later, this urge was replaced by curiosity and wonder. In London Fog, after 1906 (Maas Family Collection) by Anna Alma-Tadema, a tree emerges, spectral-like, through the greenish-gloom of a London smog. An extraordinarily narrow painting, it finds beauty in the sulphurous smell and visual effects of polluted air, in a manner that would have been unthinkable half-a-century earlier.
The next section, ‘All Smell is Disease’ reveals how intense smells were seen to depress spirits, lower morals, and poison the body. John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past, 1859 (Tate Britain) was exhibited the year after ‘the Great Stink’, when the stench from sewage in the River Thames terrified Londoners, as it was widely believed to cause cholera. The painting shows a sex-worker in her parlour with the river stench infiltrating through an open window, associating corrupted morals with the overpowering stench.
The association between intense smells and moral and physical corruption is also evident in Evelyn de Morgan’s Medea, 1889 (Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead), where fumes rise from the sorceress’ vial of poison. A second example pertaining to Victorian ideas about intense smells having a drug-like effect is Waterhouse’s Psyche Opening the Golden Box, 1903 (Private Collection), in which a scented sleeping spell curls from the casket, ready to overpower the protagonist into slumber.
Bridging themes explored in ‘Women Smelling Flowers’, ‘All Smell is Disease’, and the proceeding ‘Scent and Spirituality’ is G F Watts’ Eve Tempted, c.1868 (Watts Gallery Trust). Eve thrusts her face deep into the apple tree blossoms in her lust for the forbidden fruit. She appears utterly intoxicated by the colours and scents of the flowers, alluding to the popular Victorian belief that the sense of smell was associated with sex, animality, and earthly temptations.
In the section ‘Scent and Spirituality’, the link between faith and smell is explored. It is here that visitors can experience the two paintings accompanied by three custom-made scents dispersed via Puig’s AirParfum olfactory technology. For ASaint of the Eastern Church, 1867-68 (Birmingham Museums Trust) Puig’s Senior Perfumer and Creative Director Gregorio Sola has developed a scent that invites viewers to enter the imagined church of the saint with the aroma of smouldering frankincense emitted from the brass censer, myrtle flowers, beeswax candles, polished wooden pews, the coolness of interior stone columns, and even the Saint’s vestments. The myrtle has particularly intriguing symbolism. It has various meanings in different cultures, standing for love, male sexual vigour, nakedness, shame, good deeds and god’s love. A queer artist, Simeon Solomon’s painting perhaps alluded to the sanctity of gay sex at a time when homosexuality, and incense in Anglican churches, was both illegal and taboo.
In Millais’s iconic painting The Blind Girl, 1856 (Birmingham Museums Trust), two begging girls are depicted resting by a wayside next to a lush, green pasture, beneath a double rainbow that illuminates a dark-grey sky. As Victorians imagined rainbows to have a sweet, fresh aroma, the blind girl experiences the joy of the rainbow and, by association, closeness to God, through smell. The second of Puig’s perfumes aims to capture the moment when the intense weather of the storm subsides to reveal the sweet freshness of the English countryside. The third Puig scent aims to bring to life the experience of the younger sibling who gazes at the rainbow in awe whilst comforting herself within her sister’s rain-dampened Linsey-woolsey shawl. This scent aims to reflect the feeling of sisterly comfort between the girls. Together the two scents contrast the hope of God’s promise of heaven (signalled by the rainbow), with the earthly reality of rural poverty, emphasised by the coarse, sack-like material of the shawl.
The exhibition ends with Evelyn de Morgan’s The Cadence of Autumn, 1905 (The De Morgan Foundation), which highlights the changing visual imagery of scent in painting at the turn of the century. A ribbon of smoky blue odour evokes the scent of autumn leaves, swept up by the breeze, both a response to the cultural mood of lament following the Boer War and, painted in De Morgan’s 50th year, her personal reflections on the passing of time and the ‘seasons of life.’
Scented Visions is curated by Dr Christina Bradstreet, author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 (Penn State University Press, 2022) with support from Watts Gallery Exhibitions Curator, Corinna Henderson. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Artphilia, the storytelling art curators, and Puig’s AirParfum olfactory technology. The fragrances are designed by Puig’s Senior Perfumer and Creative Director, Gregorio Sola.
This exhibition has been developed in partnership with The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, and was originally exhibited there under the title Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from 11th October 2024 until 26th January 2025. The exhibition at Watts Gallery is an expanded version, further developing themes and subject matter through the addition of seven new painting loans.
Dr Christina Bradstreet says:
“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.”
Antje Kiewell, Founder and Director of Artphilia, says
“Artphilia is delighted to collaborate with Dr Christina Bradstreet and with Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village and The Barber Institute in adding a new, emotive dimension to viewing art, thanks to AirParfum’s innovative olfactory technology. The exhibition offers a new way to make sense of art, inviting viewers to explore, one-on-one, the ideas conveyed by the artists with their personal emotions and memories – as only our sense of smell allows us to do.”
Gregorio Sola, Chief Perfumer and Creative Director, Puig, says on the creation of the scents:
“When working on the perfumes for the paintings, you pay attention to the small details. You imagine what Millais or Solomon were feeling with each stoke of their paintbrush, then you build up the perfume expressing yourself through the ingredients of the fragrance.
Perfume is like a diamond with different sparkling facets, blended and created in a harmonious way to offer you a unique experience, just like the brushstrokes of a painting. Your nose can explore the perfume from one note to another, but all of them are part of the same composition. Like in a symphony, when you are captivated by the melody of one of the instruments – in the perfume you can identify the scent of green apples, grass, or the earthy notes of ditch water arising from within the painting.
Thanks to AirParfum technology, you can smell all of those facets at the same time or get caught in just one of them, like when you are wearing your fragrance on your skin and you can smell all of the richness of the perfume.”
Alistair Burtenshaw, Brice Director and Chief Executive, Watts Gallery Trust, says:
“Creating opportunities for visitors to see 19th century art through a 21st century lens is an important part of our exhibition programme here at Watts Gallery, and this experience is at the heart of Scented Visions. Working together with our partners, we’re delighted to present new, innovative approaches - in this exhibition through the power of scent to help audiences engage more deeply with works of art in different ways. The exhibition and its associated programme support our vision to be a creative home for our community.”
A programme of events accompanies the exhibition, details of which will be released during the exhibition run: www.wattsgallery.org.uk/whats-on
For further information:
wattsgallery.org.uk
Instagram @wattsgalleryFacebook /wattsgalleryartistsvillage
Tamsin Williams – tamsin@wigwampr.com – 07939 651252
We are delighted to be partnering with Silent Pool and Little Greene for this exhibition.
Watts Gallery Trust is an independent charity established in 1904 to enable future generations to connect with the art and ideas of George Frederic Watts, one of the leading artists of the nineteenth century, and his artist-wife, Mary Seton Watts.
G F Watts OM RA (1817-1904) was widely considered to be the greatest painter of the Victorian age. He became the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the artist’s ‘gift to the Nation’ made a significant contribution to the founding collections of Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery.
Mary Watts (1848-1939) was an artist, designer, writer, businesswoman and philanthropist. Her art supported and inspired the people around her, involving local communities in her projects. She was the creative powerhouse behind two significant enterprises: the Watts Chapel and the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild.
Today, Watts Gallery - Artist’s Village continues George and Mary Watts's legacy of Art for all by all. This vision to make art accessible to everyone is realised through a dynamic and multi-sensory programme of creativity, exhibitions, contemporary art projects and community engagement. Read more.
Artphilia are London based storytellers who aim to expand how we experience art. Adding scents to the viewing experience invites viewers to pause and craft their own narratives which connects the artworks, the artist’s vision and the audience in the most compelling and importantly memorable way – elevating any collection of artworks to a captivating and thought-provoking experience as seen at the Museo del Prado, Madrid in 2022 and Christie’s London Classic Week Auctions in 2023. At the Museo del Prado, viewers interacted with Jan Brueghel and Rubens The Sense of Smell for 13 minutes versus the average holding time of 32 seconds. For more information, visit artphilia.co or follow @artphilia.co on Instagram.
Puig’s AirParfum olfactory technology is unique in the world of perfume, it makes it possible to appreciate an unlimited number of scents without sensorial overwhelm and at no risk to the integrity of the artwork. The AirParfum olfactory technology, available for use in the gallery, dispenses scented dry air molecules, allowing viewers to experience the smell of several different elements present in two of the key paintings in the exhibition. For more information, visit airparfum.com
Puig is a home of Love Brands, within a family company, that furthers wellness, confidence and self-expression while leaving a better world. Since 1914, our company’s entrepreneurial spirit, creativity and passion for innovation have made Puig a global leader in the premium beauty industry. Present in the fragrance and fashion, makeup and skincare segments, our house of Love Brands generates engagement through great storytelling that connects with people’s emotions and is reinforced by a powerful ecosystem of founders. Puig portfolio includes our brands Rabanne, Carolina Herrera, Charlotte Tilbury, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, Dries Van Noten, Byredo, Penhaligon’s, L’Artisan Parfumeur, Uriage, Apivita, Dr. Barbara Sturm, Kama Ayurveda and Loto del Sur as well as the beauty licenses of Christian Louboutin, Banderas and Adolfo Dominguez, among others.
At Puig we honor the values and principles put in place by three generations of family leadership. Today we continue to build on that legacy, through conscious commitments in our ESG Agenda (environmental, social and governance) aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In 2023, Puig recorded net revenues of €4,304 million. Puig sells its products in more than 150 countries and has offices in 32 of them. For more information, visit Puig’s website.