Spring Awakenings

Calls for sunshine, fresh air and cleanliness by Victorian sanitary campaigners such as Edwin Chadwick influenced the trend for lighter, brighter en-plein-air paintings in the
1840s and 1850s. This trend gathered momentum as the century progressed and inspired the brightness of Pre-Raphaelite paintings such as Millais’s The Blind Girl (1854-56) and later works such as Sandys’s Gentle Spring (1865) and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s The Lover’s World (1901-05). These paintings evoke fresh Spring meadow scents and feature rainbows and butterflies  symbols of the soul, that also connote scent.

Well-read Victorians may have been reminded of the literary notion of the ‘odour of the rainbow’ — the idea that rainbows evoked the scent of wet earth, grass and flowers, when the sun comes out after a rainstorm and a rainbow is to be seen —the aroma now known as ‘petrichor.’1 A possible source for Millais’s painting is a poem entitled The Blind Girl by Jon Snow of 1845, in which a blind girl expresses her gratitude for her senses, saying:

Once on the porch while I was resting
To hear the raindrops in their mirth,
You said you saw the rainbow cresting
The heavens with colours based on earth:
And I believe it fills the showers with music;
and when sweeter air
Than common breathes from briar-rose bowers,
I think the rainbow has touched there.2

The blind girl in the poem explains to her sister that it is through her sense of smell that she experiences the Lord. Just as the colours of the rainbow signalled God’s omnipresence, scent offered a bridge between earth and heaven.

For Christian viewers of the painting, rainbows held divine significance. As a reminder of the Covenant and the promise of redemption, the rainbow suggests the ‘better world to come’. By the nineteenth century, the rainbow was also a symbol of Christ. For example, in 1865, one Presbyterian minister wrote:

Christ is the token of a tempest ended, a darkness passed, even as the bow only comes forth when the rain is over and gone. The Sun of Righteousness beams out sweetly and clearly in the soul’s purified air and gilds the clouds of sorrow and sin; the heart is all fresh and fragrant with new spiritual life, as when the grass and trees sparkle with drops left by a departed shower; peace and stillness reign …and wide and high in the soul’s sky is reared the jewelled arch of hope.3

Millais’s radiant pastoral scene might then be considered as a scene of redemption and as an allegorical sacramental landscape, in which Communion is achieved through sensorial—indeed synesthetic—appreciation of the natural world.

In Fortescue-Brickdale’s The Lover’s World, the ecstasy of being newly in love is presented as a spring awakening and as a metaphor for Communion. In the painting the figure of a girl wearing an emerald-green dress in the Aesthetic Movement style (which was characterised by uncorseted or less structured tailoring inspired by Medieval and Renaissance costume) is depicted gazing at a pair of songbirds perched, open-beaked, among blossom-laden blackthorn. She is surrounded by the dewy grasses and daisies at her feet and fairy attendants that swing golden censers billowing clouds of incense. These fairies dance and drift through gusts of scented vapor that swirl and sweep across this flowery fantasia. As the artist explained in a text that accompanied the exhibition of her work, the painting discloses

The mysteries of Spring, the Springtime of Youth, of the World, of Love.
As a flower-sheath drops and shows the bud, so has love unfolded and shown
to this girl Life, Song, Colour and Music. With clasped hands, an action suggestive
of awakening after sleep, she moves amid Spring Flowers.4

For Fortescue-Brickdale, scent was a means to herald ‘things felt but not seen’.5

Dr Christina Bradstreet

This text accompanies the exhibition Scent & the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 11 October 2024 – 26 January 2025.

Endnotes
1. C. Jarltzberg, ‘Odour from the Rainbow’, Notes and Queries, 73, 1851, p. 224; C. Forbes, ‘Odour from the Rainbow’, Notes and Queries, 77, April 1851, p. 310.
2. R. Snow, ‘The Blind Girl’, in Memoirs of a Tour and Miscellaneous Poems, London, 1845, p. 247.
3. J. M. Sherwood, ‘The Rainbow as a Symbol of Christ’, Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly Devoted to Religious and Useful Literature, October 1865, p. 526.
4. Catalogue text affixed to the back of the painting.
5. ‘Our Rising Artists: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’, Magazine of Art, 26, 1902, p. 260