We sat down with Scented Visions Guest Curator and author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850 - 1914, Dr Christina Bradstreet, to find out about how the exhibition blossomed from her book and what led her down the path of scent within 19th and early 20th century art.

The exhibition is titled Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915; directly echoing your book title. What inspired you to translate the ideas from the page into a physical exhibition space at Watts Gallery? What opportunities and challenges did this transition present?

Bringing together paintings that evoke scent, and showing them as an exhibition, is the most impactful way to show how important smell was within Pre-Raphaelitism and the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements that followed.

Scented Visions (the book) has been described as beautifully written and well-illustrated, but as an academic publication, it is mainly read by scholars and those with a keen interest in the subject. The exhibition, in contrast, provides an opportunity to make a few key ideas accessible to a much-expanded audience, most of whom will have little or no prior awareness of the topic.

With an exhibition, everything depends on which paintings you can get! I would have loved to show Millais’s Autumn Leaves and Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose, but for reasons beyond our control, we couldn’t get these. Had they been in the show, I would have told slightly different stories – going deeper into ideas of scent, memory and grief, as well as Victorian ideas about the erotics of scent. Overall, though I’m thrilled with the paintings we have in the show. Exhibition curating has an exciting serendipity to it, and I was introduced to a couple of great paintings by women artists that I was not previously aware of. Anna Alma-Tadema’s London Fog came to my attention when it was offered to me by an art dealer I was consulting with, and May Louise Greville Cooksey’s Maria Virgo was a fabulous consolation prize, offered by the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth on declining our request for one of their most in-demand works by Rossetti.

Watts Gallery is known for the work of G F and Mary Watts. How do the themes of Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915 resonate with or offer a new perspective on their art and the broader artistic context of their time? Are there specific pieces in the Watts collection that particularly informed or are highlighted in the exhibition?

It was always my dream to have an exhibition here at Watts Gallery, and I am thrilled this has come to fruition. My PhD thesis, on this subject, was completed right, here when, in 2007, I was living here on site with my friend, who was the assistant curator at the time – so it’s like this research has come back home!

Watts engaged with the sense of smell in at least three of his paintings, Found Drowned (1850), Eve Tempted (1868) and Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’) (1864). Choosing is a particularly important painting within the nineteenth-century history of ‘scented visions’. With its glorious colours, fragrant violets, and image of smelling, it places scent and synaesthesia (one sense triggering another) at the centre of Victorian Aestheticism. It’s the earliest painting I’ve found in my research to focus on a woman, eyes-closed, smelling flowers, up-close and central – a motif that became increasingly popular over the half-century that followed. Choosing depicts Ellen Terry (the celebrated actress, who had recently left the stage to become Watts’s wife, aged just 17, to his 46). Of course, she is not really smelling, she’s acting smelling – as the camellias that she presses to her nose are unscented. Cultivated, unscented flowers like the camellia, were often described in Victorian popular culture as showy and superficial, in contrast to wild scented flowers (like the violets which she clutches to her heart) which

are seen as humble and good, their scent a symbol of soul. The painting can be seen as the artist’s private commemoration of the choice Terry had recently made between a flamboyant, superficial life on the stage and a comparatively sheltered life of domestic decency, as Watts’s first wife and muse.

However, as my book explains, when you dig into the language of flowers, Victorian ideas about scented and unscented flowers and the moral and aesthetic debates fought over the hierarchy of the senses, including the respective merits and pitfalls of the visual and the olfactory and the odorate and the inodorate, the painting quickly becomes far more complex than it first appears. By the turn of the twentieth-century, images of beautiful girls (such as the famous American Gibson Girl models) were everywhere in popular culture, eyes-closed, smelling flowers – but none have the complexity of meaning of this early work!

The Victorian era witnessed significant social and scientific changes. How did these developments influence the way smell was perceived and represented in art during this period?

The works in this exhibition date from just prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) and take us right up to the first world war. During these years, several cultural shifts took place that make this an interesting and important time vis-à-vis smell and its influence upon the artistic imagination. The 1850s were a decade of heightened fear of smell as an indicator of disease and social danger (proximity to the ‘wrong kind’ of people). With its depiction of a sex worker standing by a window overlooking the miasmic River Thames, Spencer Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (1859) is clearly influenced by this. With advances in sanitation reform and the advent of germ theory in the 1860s, this fear was supplanted by a suspicion of perfume, which was increasingly perceived as toxic and linked to mental and emotional instability and deviant behaviours. This perception of the toxicity of perfume coincided with the repositioning of the booming fragrance market toward a focus on women (before then perfumes had been used interchangeably by men and women), at a time when anxieties around women’s liberation were on the rise. Evelyn de Morgan’s Medea (1889), with its depiction of a vengeful sorceress holding a deadly perfumed potion, exemplifies how artworks can be informed by such cultural phenomena.

The 1860s and 1870s also saw a gradual acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859). In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin had suggested that humans lost much of their sense of smell in the process of evolving from animals. Taking this as their starting point, commenters then widely imagined white, heterosexual middle-class men to have evolved to such a peak of civilisation as to have the least sense of smell, while everyone else - i.e. women, children, people of colour, the working class, and homosexual men were thought to have a greater sense of smell, being ‘closer to the animals’ in evolutionary terms. Ideas of smell and evolution resonated in philosophical discussions over whether perfumery could and should be elevated to an art form. Equally, they informed nineteenth-century artistic representations of smell and smelling, including racialized and gendered paintings of harem women perfuming themselves or white Western “angels of the house” (a name for perfect domestic wives) making potpourri. Indeed, the abundance of “scented visions” featuring women corresponds with contemporary studies in which women were reported to possess a more acute, animal-like sense of smell and to be more susceptible to its pleasures and pains than “the more civilized sex.”

The exhibition covers a significant period, 1850-1915. Were there any shifts or evolutions in how artists approached or depicted smell during this time frame?

Western artists have long tried to represent smell. Think Renaissance paintings of the Adoration of the Magi, with the aromatic gifts of frankincense and bitter myrrh symbolising prayer and Christ’s suffering, of Mary Magdalen with her fragrant ointment balm, or even of God breathing life into Adam.

Traditionally, smell had been represented through representations of olfactory objects (such as flowers, perfume bottles, incense burners, and steaming bowls of soup); actions related to smelling (such as leaning in to smell a flower, dabbing perfume on the wrist, or pressing a handkerchief to the nose); and corresponding body language and facial expressions, whether of pleasure or disgust.

By the late nineteenth-century these were often no longer seen as enough to evoke the synaesthetic qualities demanded of art. Artists increasingly combined these signs with new expressive codes for rendering smell visually meaningful, such as fairies, fragrance trails, and coloured vapours. Such paintings convey the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century desire to understand smell and the nature and impact of its impact on the body and mind. Beyond the reach of normal vision, smell was mysterious, intangible, and ephemeral. Part of its appeal was its invisibility – whether described in words or depicted as an image – much is lost in translation. Yet, from the 1850s, there was a strong impulse to try to see or visualize invisible smell so as to better understand it, and this in turn inspired artists to explore new ways of giving visual presence to it.

Tell us about the experience of working with the perfumer at PUIG to develop scents to accompany two of paintings. How did that process affect your own experience with the works?

It was such a honour to work with the team at PUIG. Gregorio Sola, Senior Perfumer, read my work on the paintings carefully, and was at pains to respond to my ideas with the scents he created, but he also brought his own knowledge and imagination into the mix as well. For example, I saw incense, candle smoke, myrtle scent and brass polish in Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church – and Gregorio has incorporated all of that, but he also picked up the scent of the wooden columns and panels and even the scent of the silk vestments – something I had never considered. Some of my favourite moments in putting the exhibition together, involved the ‘smelling meetings’ held over zoom with Gregorio presiding. Selected staff at the Watts Gallery and the Barber Institute (where a version of this exhibition was held) and I were sent smelling sticks with versions of the scents on them, and then we all met to discuss which ones we preferred. We were in total agreement for two out of three scents, the other was a majority vote, on which I was outvoted!

As an art historian specialising in Victorian art, what initially sparked your interest in exploring the often-overlooked sense of smell in this context?

The exhibition is the culmination of 23 years of research – that’s as long as Darwin took to write origin of the species! I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the language of health and disease in the critical response to the art and poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – that is to say, how critics described his art as unhealthy and diseased. One paragraph of that dissertation was about critics describing his paintings as emanating a sickly-sweet miasmic perfume that would emanate out of the paintings – the implication seeming to be that they would corrupt the male viewer and emasculate them. Meanwhile Millais’s painting were described as smelling of fresh Highland mountain air and heather – and here the implication seemed to be that these were manly and healthy paintings (Millais enjoyed hunting and outdoor pursuits, while Rossetti was seen as unhealthily cloistered). I became fascinated by metaphors and meanings around smell – and from there into its representation in painting. How do you make something that is invisible visible in a painting?

Then in 2001, I finished my BA and started working in an admin job at the Cabinet office on admiralty arch on Trafalgar square in London. I would roam around the area in my lunchbreaks and one day was at the second-hand book fair on the Southbank under Blackfriars bridge. I found a book called The Foul and the Fragrant by Alain Corbin – it was a book about the smells of 18th century France – the smells of the markets in Paris, the tanneries, the perfumeries in Grasse and I knew I had to have it – that it would be lifechanging to have it! – but I didn’t have any cash on me – and they didn’t take card. So being 21 and shy, I hid it at the bottom of the box and thought I’d come back for it the next day. Unfortunately, I had messed up the book seller’s system – and I had to go back about 4 times before I finally found it! This book (although rather dry to read actually!) became so important to my research – and I took up where Corbin left off in the 1850s – and applied his approach to the cultural history of smell to paintings.

Could you tell us a bit about your research process? What kinds of sources did you consult, and what were some of the challenges in researching this topic?

To research this subject I had to learn about Victorian ideas about smell. I had to learn what they believed smell to be, and how the thought the mechanism of the nose worked, and what they thought of particular odours. I gleaned all this from reading (over three years, mainly in the British library and Wellcome libraries) Victorian writings on the body and senses, hygiene, science, medicine, pathology, death, spirituality and religion. When you start looking for the cultural associations that cluster around the senses – you find it everywhere – in soap advertising, perfume manuals, physiology texts and public health reports, religious tracts, etiquette guides, travel accounts, and gardening books. And then as I looked at artworks with this knowledge, I started to understand significant and previously overlooked aspects. Many nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century ideas about smell and smelling, such as the belief that smell is disease or that a fragrant flower can cause asphyxiation, seem outlandish today. Yet this information is vital for understanding so many “scented visions.”

What I didn’t really realise back when I was first doing the research is how ubiquitous scent really is in nineteenth-century art, Victorian painting and Pre-Raphaelite art in particular. Early on when I was doing my PhD, I had a ring-binder stuffed with photocopies of very obscure nineteenth-century paintings that I’d found on the internet, with titles like ‘scent of a rose.’ However, I only very gradually realised how central scent is in a number of key Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic paintings. I didn’t realise it because it hadn’t been looked at through that lens before! If you look in any book on Pre-Raphaelite painting you won’t find scent or smell in the index – although this is going to slowly start changing and perhaps already is. What you will probably find is a throwaway line about the multisensory nature of these works – the tactility of the fabrics, the richness of the colours, the inclusion of musical instruments – but nothing about how Victorian ideas around the senses inform the interpretations of these paintings. So, I have really pioneering something new.

Do you see the study of sensory experiences like smell becoming a more prominent area within art history? What potential does this interdisciplinary approach offer for understanding art and culture?

Yes, I definitely, see the senses as a rapidly expanding area within academic research and I believe I’ve set a model for further projects on the role of the nonvisual senses in the arts. I’m handing the baton over to others to explore art and the senses in different time periods and cultures.

It’s quite paradoxical, isn’t it? The art history of invisible smell. What this approach does is show that reconnecting with nineteenth-century ideas about smell can prompt fresh interpretations – even of iconic artworks like Millais’s The Blind Girl and Rossetti’s Proserpine. For art historians, then, this research shows the value of sensory history, and how it can enrich and transform our understanding of paintings.

My approach is equally important for sensory history, showing how artworks mirror sensory ideas. Sensory history has tended to be text-based, and my work suggests an alternative, image-based approach to the discipline. The paintings explored here are informed by what we might call the “period nose”; that is to say they have meanings that hinge upon an understanding of contemporary ideas about smell, such as the deadliness of miasma, the drug-like effects of perfume, and the association of fragrance with femininity. These and other ideas about smell connect with cultural attitudes toward modernity and, where they inform the subjects of artwork, they reveal responses to issues of the day.

Scented visions, may seem to be just ‘pretty pictures’ but what I hope that visitors will discover is that motifs of scent and smell intersected with the most vociferous discourses of the day, including sanitation, urban morality, immigration, race, mental health, sexuality, faith, and the rise in women’s independence.

Following your extensive research for Scented Visions, are there any avenues or further questions about smell in art that you are keen to explore in future research?

I’d love to take this show, or a version of it to the US. Beyond that, I’ve probably done with smell – since it is the Victorian period I know and love. However, I suspect I have a ‘Tactile Visions: Touch in art, 1850-1914’ within me, if only I can get the time to research it! What’s next for me – a break – as far as that’s possible with a full-time job and a toddler. But I would love to do more curating, now that I’ve got the bug for it! I’m so grateful to the Barber Institute and Watts Gallery for the opportunity and hope that you enjoy the show!