Visitors to a new exhibition in England will not only admire painted scenes and characters but will also have the unique opportunity to smell them.

“Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites,” currently on display at the University of Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts, highlights paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These works, created during the Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, broke away from traditional conventions, choosing to portray nature, beauty, and sensuality over conventional genre paintings and admiration for figures like the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.

The museum explains that fragrance was often subtly suggested in these paintings, through elements like figures inhaling flowers or incense. These details were added to enhance the “sensory aura” of the paintings, evoke hedonistic themes, or capture specific moods and emotions.

One of the most common motifs in Victorian painting was the image of a subject smelling flowers. For example, an 1864 portrait by George Frederic Watts depicts a young woman pressing a red bloom to her face, eyes closed in a moment of reverie. Other paintings, like John Everett Millais’ Autumn Leaves (1856), evoke less pleasant aromas, such as the scent of burning foliage.

In the exhibition, visitors can activate diffusers by pressing a button, which release fragrances inspired by the artworks. For instance, Simeon Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church (1868), which features a clergyman surrounded by a halo, is paired with a fragrance of incense and wood, mimicking the scented smoke from the incense burner in the painting.

Meanwhile, Millais’ The Blind Girl (1856) portrays a young woman and her sister sitting in a meadow with two rainbows in the sky behind them. While the blind girl cannot see the beauty of her surroundings, she relies on her other senses, including smell. This piece is accompanied by two diffusers: one capturing the scent of the meadow, and the other evoking the girl’s clothing.

Bradstreet, the exhibition’s curator, notes that The Blind Girl is “a painting about sight, blindness, and spiritual vision” and that the stillness of the girl in the painting suggests a heightened awareness of the surrounding scents and sounds.

The Barber Institute collaborated with art curation company Artphilia and Spanish perfumer Puig, who created the diffusers and fragrances on display in the exhibition. For The Blind Girl, Puig crafted two distinct scents: one that captures the smell of the rain-soaked pasture, with fresh grass, spring flowers, damp earth, and water, and another evoking the scent of the younger sister’s shawl, which carries the damp, musty, yet comforting fragrance of the cloth.

This trend of combining scent with visual art is not new. In 2022, the Prado Museum in Madrid introduced floral and vegetal fragrances alongside The Sense of Smell, a 1618 painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. The museum found that while visitors typically spent about 32 seconds in front of a painting, they lingered for around 13 minutes when the scent was added.

Bradstreet explains that the goal of these scent-infused exhibitions is to give visitors a richer experience: “We want people to take a long, slow look at the paintings, smell the scents, and perhaps imagine themselves within the scene. It’s not just about seeing the visual details.”

The exhibition Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites will be open at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts until January 26, 2025.