You can smell the incense, rainy meadows and musty fabrics in these Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Visitors to a new exhibition in England can not only look at painted scenes and characters, but also smell them.

“Fragrance and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites”, which is on display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, focuses on paintings made in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These works are part of the Stylish And pre-Raphaelite movements – those conventions such as genre painting and reverence for artists such as the Italian Renaissance painter Raphaeland chose to portray nature and beauty.

According to the museum, scent was often ‘visually suggested’ in paintings from these movements, for example in the form of a person smelling flowers or burning incense. Artists added such details to enhance the ‘sensory aura’ of paintings hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) or evoke certain moods and emotions.

“While Pre-Raphaelite painting (in its broadest definition) is beloved for its sensual beauty, including beautiful colors, textures, and allusions to music, the olfactory aspects of these works have long been overlooked,” writes exhibition curator Christina Bradstreet, author of Fragrant visions: scent in art, 1850-1914at the Barber Institute website.

A common motif in Victorian painting was a subject that smelled of flowers, Bradstreet adds. For example, a Portrait from 1864 Through George Frederic Watts shows a young woman pressing a red flower to her face, ‘eyes closed, lost in reverie.’ Other paintings evoke less pleasant smells, such as the burning foliage of John Everett Millais‘ Autumn leaves (1856).

In the exhibition two works of art are flanked by diffusers, which visitors can activate by pressing a button, according to the Spectatorby Melanie McDonagh. Simeon Solomon’s portrait of a preacher with halo, A saint of the Eastern Church (1868), is accompanied by the smell of incense and wood, which mimics the fragrant smoke coming from the subject’s incense burner.

Meanwhile, Millais’ The blind girl (1856) shows a young woman and her younger sister sitting in a lush meadow, with two rainbows arching through the sky behind them. “Even though she can’t see the stunning environment she’s in, she can still rely on her other senses, including smell,” she wrote. Artnet‘Tim Brinkhof. As such, the painting is accompanied by two diffusers, one reminiscent of the girls’ clothing and the other of their natural environment.

The blind girl is “a painting about sight, blindness and spiritual vision,” says Bradstreet Observer‘s Dalya Alberge. “The girl’s stillness indicates a heightened alertness to the smells and sounds we imagine coming from the meadow.”

The Barber Institute partnered with an art conservation company Artphilia and Spanish perfumer Puigwho created the diffusers and fragrances featured in ‘Fragrance and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites’. For The blind girlthe main work of the show, Puig created two fragrances.

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

In recent years, other museums have organized similar scent-focused displays. In 2022, Madrid Prado Museum also installed floral and plant scents The sense of smella painting from 1618 by Flemish artists Jan Brueghel the Elder And Peter Paul Rubens. The Prado found that visitors typically stand in front of a painting for about 32 seconds, but they did stay in front of it The sense of smell for approximately 13 minutes.

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

“Fragrance and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites‘ is on view at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts until January 26, 2025.