The Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham often has fancy ideas for shows. But it’s outdone itself with Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, an event that looks simultaneously at the way art looks and how it smells.
It’s inspired by a book published in 2022 by Dr Christina Bradstreet, a curator and theoretician, that looked in detail at the impact of smell on art in the years 1850-1914: the big years of urban stinking. The Victorians were obsessed with smell. London in particular produced a disgusting daily pong of industrial smoke and toilet airs. The Thames was a sewer. The streets were full of shit.
It was made legendary by the Great Stink of 1858 when a fatal combination of hot weather and the rivers of untreated human waste flowing through the capital created a stench no one could escape: you can’t hide from smell. The stink prompted Joseph Bazalgette’s creation of a new sewage system for London that ferried the ordure out of the city and deposited it lower down the Thames so it could flow freely into the sea. London was freshened. Nature murdered.
Victorian theories about the role played by smell in the spread of diseases, particularly cholera, added yet more pungency to the situation. Victorian art did not choose to grow interested in smell. Smell forced its way into Victorian art like the stench of a rotting corpse. Especially, it forced its way into the art of the pre-Raphaelites.
The show presents us with a dozen or so glowing examples. Most feature thoughtful damsels, some mythical, some from the streets, being watched from a voyeuristic distance as they open forbidden boxes or lean down to smell a naughty flower. There’s no obvious sense of smog or stink — and that turns out to be the point. The brightness, the dreaminess, the full-colour prettiness of pre-Raphaelite art was a deliberate reaction to the dankness of industrial England. Art is being used here like air-freshener in a toilet: the Febreze effect.
That’s the big point. But as we get closer to the chief pictures — well-chosen, involving, transportative — we begin to discern a more nuanced messaging. Evelyn de Morgan’s Medea or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine feel as if the women being painted are themselves a variety of fragrant bloom: beautiful, inventively coloured, with hints of deadly poison. The unmissable bouquet of the Victorian femme fatale.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, however, is after a different storyline in his Thoughts of the Past from 1859. A young woman stands by a window that has opened out onto a grimy view of the industrial Thames. The gentleman’s dressing gown she wears and the walking stick on the floor identify her as a sex worker servicing a wealthy client. The view through the window sets her reality in the aromas of London. Stanhope is weaponising the stench of the capital in a snippy social critique.
All this is interesting — fascinating even — but the show takes a surreal turn when actual smells, an assortment of perfumes developed specially for the event by the Spanish fragrance giant Puig, are unleashed upon us. Two compelling pictures, The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais from 1854-56 and A Saint of the Eastern Church by Simeon Solomon from 1867-68, have been made the focus of special olfactory attention.
The Blind Girl is Millais at his most manipulative and inventive. Two ragged vagabond girls, one blind, the other the younger sister she looks after, have sat down by a stream in a meadow while a giant rainbow in the sky behind mocks the blindness of the older girl with a bright burst of hopeful colour. The gorgeous field of zinging yellow behind them puts the boot in harder.
Apparently, Millais also had a specific smell in mind for the scene, what we call in modern parlance petrichor, the smell of the earth after it has rained. So the fragrance masters at Puig have had a go at creating a perfume that evokes exactly that aroma. You can smell their efforts by pressing a button on a dispenser located at the front of the picture.
Another touching Millais detail, the caring arm of the older sister wrapping a protective woollen blanket about her younger charge to keep her dry, has prompted a second Puig fragrance. This time they are seeking the smell of the warm and woolly blanket with its protective air. Quite a challenge.
There’s more. Simeon Solomon’s strange image of an Eastern saint — the only man in the show — standing in an ornate church setting and staring straight at us, like Christ as the Salvator Mundi, has another kind of olfactory past. The Victorian era saw fierce battles erupting in the Anglican community between those who wanted their religion to be more Protestant and those who wanted it more Catholic. It was a battle fought not only with Bibles, but with smells. Incense, smouldering candles and noisy church bells were frowned upon by the puritans in the “Smells and Bells” scandal.
Solomon is clearly on the Catholic side of the argument. His transported Eastern saint holds an incense burner in one hand and a sprig of myrtle in the other. The people at Puig have therefore had a go at capturing those smells too.
How did they do? Badly is the cruel truth. I don’t know much about perfume, but I do remember walking into old people’s homes and drinking in a sickly sweetness that’s trying to mask an underlying darkness. Puig, who make perfumes for Jean Paul Gaultier and Nina Ricci, should entitle their new aroma The Smell of Grandma.
Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, until January 26; barber.org.uk
