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

A new exhibition in England is offering visitors a unique sensory experience by allowing them to not only view painted scenes and characters but also smell them. The exhibition, titled “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites,” is currently on display at the University of Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The focus of the exhibition is on paintings created in the 19th and early-20th centuries as part of the Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite movements.

These artistic movements rejected traditional conventions such as genre painting and the reverence for artists like Raphael, instead opting to portray nature and beauty in a more unconventional way. One interesting aspect of these paintings is the inclusion of fragrance as a sensory element. Artists often included details like a person smelling flowers or burning incense to enhance the paintings’ sensory aura, portray hedonism, or evoke specific moods and emotions.

According to exhibition curator Christina Bradstreet, author of “Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914,” the olfactory aspects of Pre-Raphaelite paintings have long been overlooked. One common motif in Victorian painting was a subject smelling flowers, which added an extra layer of sensory experience to the art. For example, a portrait by George Frederic Watts shows a young woman lost in reverie as she presses a red bloom to her face.

The exhibition features two artworks that are accompanied by diffusers, allowing visitors to trigger scents by pressing a button. One of the paintings, Simeon Solomon’s “A Saint of the Eastern Church,” is paired with the fragrance of incense and wood, replicating the scented smoke wafting from the subject’s incense burner. Another painting, John Everett Millais’ “The Blind Girl,” depicts a young woman and her sister in a lush meadow, with scents evoking their clothing and natural surroundings.

The Barber Institute collaborated with art curation company Artphilia and Spanish perfumer Puig to create the diffusers and scents for the exhibition. For “The Blind Girl,” Puig developed two scents that capture the rain-soaked pasture and the musty yet comforting shawl worn by the younger sibling.

Similar scent-focused displays have been staged in other museums in recent years, with the aim of enhancing visitors’ understanding and appreciation of the art. The exhibition “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” will be on view at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts until January 26, 2025. It offers a unique opportunity for art lovers to engage with these historical paintings in a whole new way, through the sense of smell.