Curator’s Introduction: Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

Curator’s Introduction: Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites explores the role of smell in mid-late Victorian art. It spans Pre-Raphaelite social realism of the 1850s and the Aesthetic ‘cult of beauty’ of the 1860s-1880s though to early-twentieth century Post Pre-Raphaelitism and Symbolism. It explores why and how artists were inspired by, and engaged with, invisible smell, and the ways in which they grappled with its visual representation.

While Pre-Raphaelite painting (in its broadest definition), is beloved for its sensuous beauty, including exquisite colours, textures and allusions to music, the olfactory aspects of these works have long been overlooked. Yet, scent is a key motif in various paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements including works that are included in this exhibition by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon and Evelyn de Morgan among many others. With its glorious colours and fragrant violets, Watts’s Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”), 1864 (National Portrait Gallery, London) is an early, influential example of the popular Victorian motif of a women smelling flowers, eyes closed, lost in reverie. A later example of this is Waterhouse’s The Shrine, 1895. Indeed, fragrance was evoked in Aestheticism from its conception, the aroma of burning leaves being central to Millais’s Autumn Leaves, 1855-56 (Manchester Art Gallery), and therefore to the artist’s shift from Pre-Raphaelite narrative and realism towards Aestheticism’s focus on ‘art for art’s sake.’

In Victorian Aestheticism, fragrance is visually suggested in images of daydreaming figures smelling flowers or burning incense. Scent was also implied in Victorian painting to evoke hedonism (pleasure in exquisite sensations – and a preoccupation with beauty) and to reflect the Victorian vogue for synaesthesia (evoking one sense through another), as well as for art, like scent, to evoke moods, emotions and unspeakable longings.

The emphasis of Victorian Aestheticism on beauty rather than the paintings’ narratives obscures recognition of the contemporary relevance of the paintings, including the social and cultural significance of smell in these works. Yet, Victorian ideas associated with both particular smells and the sense of smell in general, raise themes relating to cultural and social issues of the day, such as sanitation and urban morality, drug addiction, immigration, race, faith and prejudice, illegal homosexuality, mental health and the rise in women’s independence.

Many 19th- and early 20th-century notions about smell seem outlandish today. These include: the idea that smell is the manifestation of disease (having a drug-like, depressive effect not only on the health of the body but also on mood and morals); the belief that rainbows radiate the fragrance of dewy meadows as an olfactory sign of God’s presence and promise of salvation; and that women, non-westerners and homosexual men have a more acute sense of smell than white middle-class heterosexual men because they were perceived as being more akin to animals in evolutionary terms.

Another surprising idea is that paintings were understood by some to experienced synaesthesically. In 1855, the Victorian physiologist Alexander Bain described vivid multisensory experiences as the normal, healthy response to imagery. A picture of flowers, he argued ‘gives an agreeable suggestion of the fragrance’, because it would trigger memories of smelling actual flowers, setting into play the exact same muscles and nerve tracks. With their gorgeous flowers, censers of incense and vials of scented poison, Victorian Aesthetic paintings seem designed to prompt an intense multisensory reaction. 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.

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.