Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces in a forthcoming exhibition will offer more than just a feast for the eyes. Curators are planning to stimulate both visual and olfactory senses by pairing scents evoked by the paintings.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, at Birmingham University, will introduce a variety of smells alongside artworks in its exhibition opening on 11 October.
Sir John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl from 1854-56 – showing a blind girl and her companion resting beside a meadow beneath dark rain clouds and a double rainbow– will be accompanied by the smell of fresh wet grass and damp earth, evoking English countryside after the rain.
Simeon Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church, 1867-68, in which a man with a halo holds an incense-burner, will offer scents of incense and amber wood from a church’s wooden interior.
The scents will be released by individual visitors when they press a button on a nearby diffuser. Those who prefer just to look at pictures, relying on the artist’s ingenuity to stimulate senses and imaginations, will not smell a thing.
The Birmingham exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, will also feature works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse, among others, from public and private collections, including Tate Britain in London, the Ashmolean in Oxford and the Birmingham Museums Trust.
Organisers have used the latest olfactory technology, diffusing scents on air molecules. They did not saturate our sense of smell or harm works of art, they said.
In 2022, the Prado in Madrid introduced scents that recreated the fragrances of plants and flowers depicted in The Sense of Smell, the 1618 painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. It found that visitors spent more time looking at the painting – about 13 minutes rather than the average 32-second “viewer engagement”.
Inspired by the success, the museum now has a multi-sensory display featuring the smell of scented leather gloves, based on a 17th-century recipe whose ingredients included resins, balms, wood and flower essences with a hint of suede. Visitors learn that gloves were scented to disguise the foul smell from tanning leather and that these high-status symbols feature in portraits on the gallery walls.
At Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which closes next week, viewers can smell the dresses on display, and the scent of the women who wore them.
The Barber Institute holds a significant collection, including works by Sandro Botticelli, Thomas Gainsborough and Edgar Degas. Its forthcoming exhibition will explore how scent was a recurring theme in paintings, evoking moods and emotions.
The exhibition is a collaboration with “storytelling art curators” Artphilia and Spanish fashion and perfume house Puig, which invented the olfactory technology AirParfum and developed the scents.
Its curator is Dr Christina Bradstreet, author of a 2022 book, Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914, in which she wrote that “19th-century depictions of scent have been ‘right under our noses’, despite the absence of attention to smell within art-historical scholarship”. She told the Observer: “Scents in pre-Raphaelite paintings have been overlooked, but they were a key element … The hope is that people will not only see the visual details but have a strong sense of place, of being in the painting.
“It’s an experiment to see if scents can bring these paintings to life, enhancing people’s understanding of the painting. It’s not just seeing the visual details. We want people to take a long, slow look at the paintings, smell the scents and perhaps imagine themselves there in the scene.”
Among numerous “scent-infused” paintings, she cited Millais’s The Blind Girl, an allegory of the senses in which the figure with a sign around her neck bearing the words “Pity the blind” appreciates the scents, sounds and tactile sensations the viewer is excluded from: “[It] is a painting about sight, blindness and spiritual vision … The girl’s quiet stillness suggests a heightened alertness to the scents and sounds that we imagine coming from the meadow.”
Bradstreet said that Millais was probably inspired by a friend’s exposure of the plight of the rural poor and may have conceived of the blind girl as a victim of the 1845-52 Irish famine, when ophthalmia was common.
Antje Kiewell of Artphilia said the Millais painting had inspired two scents: “The first captures the rain-soaked pasture combining the aromas of freshly cut grass, bright spring flowers and other vegetation with those of damp earth and ditch-water. A second Puig scent aims to bring to life the experience of the younger sibling with the lower half of her face half-buried in her sister’s rain-dampened, musty, yet comforting, shawl.”
She said the technology was developed for sampling in perfumery halls, to avoid “saturation of the nose”, adding: “This technology creates a truly memorable museum experience, given how close our sense of smell and memories are linked due to the anatomy of our brain and that our memories go further than our eye.”
• This article was amended on 24 August 2024 to remove a reference in an earlier version that the exhibition would be the first for a museum in Britain to use smells alongside artworks.
