22, 29 September and 6 October 2025

11am - 12pm

22 October 2025

12 - 1pm

Join us for an online series of talks inspired by the exhibition Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850–1915. Leading scholars will guide us through the invisible world of fragrance in art, and how scent was imagined, symbolised, and spiritually charged in Victorian and early 20th-century painting. From the olfactory imagination to sacred incense and symbolic flowers, these talks reveal how smell shaped meaning and emotion in some of the period’s most evocative artworks.

All talks are online and can be booked individually or as a series. Talks will be live online and recordings will also be made available.

Content

22 September online talk:

Dr Caro Verbeek – All the Smells That Aren’t There: Olfactory Imagination in Art

How do we ‘smell’ a painting that contains no scent? Art historian and scent researcher Dr Caro Verbeek explores the idea of the ‘olfactory gaze’—the ability to perceive scent through visual cues. Learn how 19th- and 20th-century artists evoked the invisible world of fragrance and how new tools, like the Odeuropa scent wheel, are helping to reconstruct lost smells from the past.

29 September online talk:
Dr Christina Bradstreet – Fragrance and Feeling in Victorian Painting

Guest Curator Dr Christina Bradstreet unpacks the symbolic use of natural fragrances in iconic works of Victorian art. Discover how flowers and perfumes suggest everything from divine presence to earthly desire in paintings such as Millais’s The Blind Girl, Watts’s Eve Tempted, and Fortescue-Brickdale’s The Lover’s World.

6 October online talk:
Dr Maddie Hewitson – Scent and Spirituality: Simeon Solomon’s Sacred Sensory World

Delve into Simeon Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867–8) with art historian Dr Maddie Hewitson. This talk explores how Solomon conveyed the multi-sensory richness of Orthodox Christianity, using sight, scent, and symbolism to immerse viewers in spiritual experience.

22 October online talk:
Gregorio Sola Vela and Antje Kiewell – Discover the heart and soul of Pre-Raphaelite Scents.

Discover how the evocative painting The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais was transformed into a complex, multi-layered fragrance. Learn how top, middle, and base notes in perfumery were inspired by visual and symbolic elements of the painting. Explore the innovative AirParfum technology, created by ScentXP by Puig — enabling each visitor to experience the fragrance individually, without nose saturation, while connecting them with Millais’ vision and uncovering hidden emotional cues in the work of Simeon Solomon, awakening personal memories and intimate reflections.

Speakers

Dr. Christina Bradstreet is author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 published by Penn State University Press in 2022. She is curator of our current exhibition, Scented Visions, which began in its earlier form as Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites at The Barber Institute, University of Birmingham. Christina is Head of Programmes at the Association for Art History and an expert in art and mindfulness.

Dr. Caro Verbeek (1980) is an art historian, author and maker specialized in perception and the senses of smell. touch and the intersensory phenomenon synaesthesia. She was formerly affiliated as a researcher and curator to the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam before switching to an academic career. In 2021 she defended her Phd 'In Search of Lost Scents' on art historical smells and olfactory museology.

Verbeek is an education innovator in museums, art academies and universities, having developed several out-of-the-box methods and courses including ‘The Other Senses’ (KABK), ‘The Multisensory Gaze (Rijksmuseum) and ‘Knowing by Sensing’ (VU).
Over the past twenty years she has created numerous olfactory reconstructions of historical objects and events for museums.
Verbeek currently works as a curator of Mondrian & De Stijl in Kunstmuseum Den Haag (the Hague) and as an assistant professor of sensory history at Vrije Universiteit. She recently authored 'On the Nose - A Brief Cultural History' which was translated to several languages, including Japanese and Italian.

Dr Maddie Hewitson is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her current research explores the unique influence of the Hebrew Bible across Victorian visual culture. Maddie co-curated the exhibition Victorian Colour: Art, Fashion & Design at the Ashmolean Museum in 2023. Her research has appeared in Sculpture Journal, British Art Studies, and in edited collections on John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Gregorio Sola Vela is a Senior Perfumer at Puig, the renowned Spanish fine fragrance house. He is the creator behind all three scents featured in this exhibition, as well as the complete olfactory experience in the groundbreaking exhibition The Essence of a Painting: An Olfactory Exhibition at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Antje Kiewell is a London-based art curator and founder of Artphilia, dedicated to expanding the way we experience art. She introduced Puig’s innovative AirParfum technology to the UK, recognising its potential to create intimate, one-on-one scent encounters that reconnect today’s fast-paced viewers with the emotional depth of artists’ original visions — through the power of smell.