Seeing Smell

Beyond the reach of normal vision, smell was mysterious, intangible, and ephemeral, and this was part of its appeal for artists. 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.

In the 1850s, smell or miasma was believed to be the cause of disease prompting a scientific impulse to see smell using new high-powered microscopes. In a letter to the editor of The Times in 1854, a writer calling himself “The Investigator” described the maggot-shaped micro-organisms found floating in the airshaft of a cesspool, arguing that if people could see these they would be at greater pains to avoid breathing in stench. Having described how these looked under the microscope the author goes on to suggest that “it would not surprise me if particles of scent—say from the fox or civet—could be made apparent to the eye.” (1) The Investigator’s comments elicited mirth in Punch magazine. In an article entitled “Fragrance Visible,” the satirical magazine suggested that further investigations would show that “every odour has its shape; and we shall be able to distinguish the perfume of a dead well from that of a pigsty, by looking at it through a magnifying glass.” (2)

Fear of stench gradually declined from the 1860s onward, as the miasma theory – the theory that smell was disease – was replaced by the germ theory in public understanding. Yet the desire to see smell continued to grow. Zwaardemaker’s olfactometer (1888) designed for detecting, measuring, and comparing odour, resembled a microscope in terms of its visual design. Edison too made a clear comparison with visual technologies— his invention for measuring smell was named the “odorscope.” (3)

This compulsion to see smell went far beyond smell science, into popular culture. For example, the horticulturalist and explorer Frederick Burbidge in a Royal Horticultural Society lecture of 1898 on fragrant plants noted his

frustration at being unable to accompany his lecture with slides showing the scent particles under discussion. (4).

By the 1890s and early 1900s, artists were reimagining fragrance as shimmering, glinting molecules and palpable fragrance trails, or picturing fantasy-scapes at the “heart of the rose.” Two objects, bookending the dates of this study, illustrate this point. In 1850, Punch published a cartoon showing, as if through a microscope, the “myriad of miniscule yet hideous” forms, including the “bodies of aldermen, churchwardens and undertakers as well as bailiffs and slopsellers,” that might be “revealed in a drop of London water through the Molecular Magnifier, illuminated by the Intellectual Electric Light.”(5) Its opposite number might be said to be Lalique’s flaçon for Rosace Figurines of 1912 (not in the exhibition), a design that imagines a view into a droplet of Coty’s scent. The spherical shape of the clear, frosted sepia glass bottle creates the sense of looking under a microscope and seeing four fairies dancing in a ring. While the cartoon sits within Punch magazine’s midcentury campaign for sanitary improvement, the perfume bottle is a joyous celebration of the aesthetics of scent.

Dr Christina Bradstreet This text accompanies the exhibition Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915 Watts Gallery, Compton. 15 May – 9 November 2025

Endnotes

1. The Investigator, “Will It Ever Be Possible to Map a Smell?” The Times, September 29, 1854, 9, col. A

2. “Fragrance Visible,” Punch 27 (1854): 140.

3. H. Zwaardemaker, “On Measurement of the Sense of Smell in Clinical Examination,” Lancet 133, no. 3435 (June 1889): 1300–1302

4. On the “odorscope,” see William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson, The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), 81