Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

Simeon Solomon, A Saint of the Eastern Church (detail), 1867-68, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph: Birmingham Museums Trust

Scent is a key motif in paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. Fragrance is visually suggested in images of daydreaming figures smelling flowers or burning incense, enhancing the sensory aura of ‘art for art’s sake’. Scent was also implied in Victorian painting to evoke hedonism – pleasure in exquisite sensations – and a preoccupation with beauty; or to reflect the Victorian vogue for synaesthesia (evoking one sense through another) and the penchant for art, like scent, to evoke moods and emotions.

Motifs of scent and smell intersected with the most vociferous discourses of the day, including sanitation, urban morality, immigration, race, mental health, faith, and the rise in women’s independence. Many 19th- and early 20th-century notions about smell – that it is the manifestation of disease, that rainbows radiate the fragrance of dewy meadows, or that highly-perfumed flowers are asphyxiating – seem outlandish today.

Yet this exhibition demonstrates how an understanding of these and other largely forgotten ideas about smell bring to the fore significant aspects of these extraordinary artworks. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to participate in an optional scent experience that will enliven the scents suggested in certain paintings. Artists featured include Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, John Frederick Lewis, John Everett Millais, Evelyn De Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and others