Three bespoke scents have been created for two of the paintings in the Scented Visions exhibition; John Everett Millais' The Blind Girl and Simeon Solomon's A Saint of The Eastern Church. These scents were created by Puig in collaboration with Artphilia and AirParfum. Author and guest curator of the exhibition, Dr Christina Bradstreet discusses the inspiration behind the scents and what they represent.

Millais’s The Blind Girl

Scent 1 captures the rain-soaked pasture, presided over by the rainbow. It is inspired by 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. This scent was understood by some Victorian Christians as a heavenly symbol of God’s presence and promise of salvation. It also suggests the reality of the damp, muddy pasture.

We considered a fruity scent – inspired by the lollypop colours of the painting – but settled on a fragrance evocative of the overall scene. The girls sit by the sea road enroute to the town of Winchelsea in Sussex, the outskirts of which can be seen in the distance. Jane Grand, a local resident describes the grazing pasture as smelling ‘delicious in spring and summer! It is a rich, earthy smell which I suppose is the soil becoming warm – it’s a great silty soil, I suppose from having been under the sea so long. The smell of the sea (and seagulls) come in with the tides, but it is not a strong salty sea smell. It is mixed with the smells of the abundant reeds and bulrushes and willow trees along the nearby military canal and the River Brede and the drainage ditches.’ A farmer recently pointed out to me that the ditch would smell of manure, as the cattle (seen in the background of the painting) would come to the ditch to drink.

Taking inspiration from the painting, the notion of the ‘odour of the rainbow’ as symbolic of God’s presence on Earth and Jane’s description of the local smellscape, PUIG perfumer Gregorio Sola set out to capture the lushness of the pasture with a fresh cut grass accord made with green notes that give the sap effect of the plant. To soften the harshness of the green notes, he blended this with a green apple (Granny Smith) note. To evoke the storm clouds, he added a ‘rain accord,’ adding freshness and humidity to the grassy scent. Finally, to represent the damp earth and ditch, he added an ‘autumn accord’ containing dark woods, brown leaves and mushroom notes, transforming a ‘crystal water accord’ into ditch water. This ‘autumn accord’ contains a facet of damp and humid earth, which he describes as like ‘when you walk in the forest in autumn after the rain and you smell the mud and the humidity of the willow bark (rough and dark).’ In this way, heaven and earth meet in this scent.

Scent 2 evokes the scent of the Linsey Woolsey cloth (a hardwearing wool weft woven with a cotton warp), worn by the girls, associated with Victorian workhouse uniform, as it keeps clean and dry. Critics of the painting read the girls as homeless orphans, earning pennies with their concertina, as they travelled from place to place. Without the security of a home or parents, they depend upon and take solace in one another. They are ‘home’ to each other.

As she twists around to gaze up and across to the double rainbow arching across the sky, the younger child in the painting nestles back against the older girl for refuge, as if amazed by and apprehensive of this spectacle. With her nose pressed against the folds of the blind girl’s head shawl, she is shown experiencing at once the extraordinary vision of the rainbow (symbol of the divine covenant) and the ordinary, even comforting, smell of old, worn fabric. The disparity between the sublime illusion of the distant, ephemeral rainbow and the tangible proximity of the shawl, which she holds to her face, makes the contrast between God’s promise of heaven, tantalisingly close yet out of reach, and the harsh reality of their everyday plight, all the more poignant.

Struck by the blind girl’s face – clean, calm, happy and grateful – and Millais’s adoption of Virgin Mary iconography (the pyramidal composition), Gregorio Sola started by creating a pure and luminous scent with a ‘white cotton accord’, like a clean T-shirt. It has an ‘an aldehydes accord’ enhanced with a hint of citrus and aromatic notes, that melt into a transparent ‘white flowers accord’ accompanied with soft, clean woods dressed in musky notes, modern, and glowing. To increase this facet, he added ‘a warm skin smell, like fresh bread blended with warm cotton flowers, velvety and soft.’ He then blended this with a note of wool - creamy, waxy, almost animalic with added amber notes to increase the warm facet of the wool – to create the contrast with the girls’ rough, dark, workhouse clothes.

Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church

The Saint holds a censer in a Church setting – and it was important to PUIG perfumer Gregorio Sola to make incense essential oil as the heart of the scent. This he has enhanced with a Myrrh accord. Myrrh is greener and sweeter than incense, increasing the brightness of the incense note. To evoke the ambiance of the Church, he has included the smell of candles and the polished wood bench, and even the stonework (using a mineral facet.) For the golden walls and dark columns behind the Saint, he played with vanilla absolute, benzoin resinoid and modern amber woods. Finally, to represent the richness and embroidery of the robe, he created a bouquet of white flowers, in which the main note comes from orange flower absolute (very creamy and soft) and tuberose absolute - a powerful flower, that is both hypnotic and addictive. These two scents are dressed with soft woods, spices and resins. Tuberose adds a religious note to the scent. (In the book of John, Chapter 12, verse 3 one reads, “Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house as filled with the odor of the ointment.”) We’ve used tuberose from Mexico, which is more sustainable than spikenard, which grows in the Himalayas and is no longer used in modern perfumery.

The Saint holds a branch of myrtle in his other hand. The symbolic meanings of myrtle (including from Greek mythology, the Bible and Jewish tradition) relate to love, shame and hiding one’s true self, male sexual potency, good deeds and God’s blessing. Together, these have interesting resonances, given the artist’s sexual identity as a homosexual Jewish man, living in Victorian London at a time when homosexuality was illegal and Jewish emancipation in Britain was still in the fairly recent past. Nevertheless, Gregorio Sola has added just a hint of myrtle essential oil. This small quantity is due to its powerful top note, a mix between aromatic notes and turpentine that make the top note harsh and chemical. For this reason, the note of myrtle is subtle and soft in the final scent.

Conclusion

In 1850, the founding members of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood set up a journal called The Germ, to disseminate their ideas. It lasted just four issues, but it did in fact include a call for smell in art. The Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, poet, critic and writer John Lucas Tupper described a visit, some years earlier, to the British Museum, in which he had found the found the whole museum to smell of camphor (a menthol-like scent found in some herbs such as rosemary and types of wood such as a laurel) and that this smell was ‘suggestive of things scientific or artistic.’ Years later a chance whiff of camphor had brought to his mind ‘the whole collection from end to end,’ starting with an enormous stuffed walrus. This experience prompted him to suggest the idea of attributing artworks and museum objects with smells, to enhance not only the viewer’s memory of the piece, but perhaps also their reverence and understanding of it. ‘Let a poem, a painting, or sculpture, smell ever so little of antiquity and every intelligent reader will be full of delightful imaginations.’(1) As Guest Curator of Scented Visions I hope the scents brought to you by PUIG in collaboration with Artphilia help bring Millais’s The Blind Girl and Simeon Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church alive to you in meaningful and memorable ways.

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

Endnote

John Lucas Tupper, ‘The Subject in Art’, The Germ, March 1850, 123.