PThe Raphaelite masterpieces in an upcoming exhibition will be more than just a feast for the eyes. Curators plan to stimulate both visual and olfactory senses by combining scents evoked by the paintings.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham will present various smells as well as works of art at its exhibition opening on October 11.

Sir John Everett Millais’ The blind girl from 1854–56 – which shows a blind girl and her companion resting beside a meadow under dark rain clouds and a double rainbow – is accompanied by the smell of fresh, wet grass and damp earth, and evokes the English countryside after the rain.

Simeon Salomon A saint of the Eastern Church1867–68, in which a haloed man holds an incense burner, the scent of incense and amber wood emanates from the wooden interior of a church.

The scents are released by individual visitors by pressing a button on a nearby diffuser. Those who prefer to just look at pictures and rely on the artist’s ingenuity to stimulate the senses and imagination will not smell anything.

The Birmingham exhibition “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” also features works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse, among others, from public and private collections, including Tate Britain in London, the Ashmolean in Oxford and the Birmingham Museums Trust.

Organizers have used the latest olfactory technology to disperse scents into air molecules, saying they would neither overwhelm our sense of smell nor damage works of art.

In 2022, the Prado in Madrid introduced fragrances that emulate the scents of the The sense of smellthe 1618 painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. The study found that visitors spent more time looking at the painting – about 13 minutes instead of the average 32 seconds of “viewer interaction.”

Inspired by the success, the museum is now showing a multi-sensory exhibition featuring the scent of perfumed leather gloves, based on a 17th-century recipe whose ingredients included resins, balsams, wood and flower essences with a hint of suede. Visitors will learn that gloves were perfumed to mask the foul smell of the tanned leather, and that these status symbols can be seen in portraits on the gallery walls.

At “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that ends next week, visitors can smell the clothes on display and smell the scent of the women who wore them.

The Barber Institute holds a significant collection, including works by Sandro Botticelli, Thomas Gainsborough and Edgar Degas. The upcoming exhibition will explore how scent was a recurring theme in paintings, evoking moods and emotions.

The exhibition is a collaboration with storytelling art curators Artphilia and Spanish fashion and perfume house Puig, which invented the olfactory technology AirParfum and developed the fragrances.

The curator is Dr. Christina Bradstreet, author of a book published in 2022, Visions of Scent: Smell in Art, 1850-1914in which she wrote that “representations of smell were ‘right under our noses’ in the 19th century, although smell was not given any attention in art historical research.” She told the observer: “Scents were overlooked in Pre-Raphaelite paintings but were a key element… The hope is that people will not only notice the visual details but also develop a strong sense of place, of being in the painting.

“It’s an experiment to see if scents can bring these paintings to life and improve people’s understanding of the painting. It’s not just about seeing the visual details. We want people to take a long, slow look at the paintings, smell the scents and maybe imagine themselves in the scene.”

Among the numerous paintings “saturated with perfumes” she mentioned Millais’ The blind girlan allegory of the senses in which the figure, wearing a sign around her neck reading “Have pity on the blind”, perceives smells, sounds and tactile sensations that are hidden from the viewer: “(It) is a painting about sight, blindness and spiritual vision… The girl’s silent immobility suggests a heightened alertness to the smells and sounds that we imagine come from the meadow.”

Bradstreet said that Millais was probably inspired by a friend’s description of the plight of the rural poor, and may have imagined the blind girl as a victim of the Irish famine of 1845–52, when eye infections were widespread.

Antje Kiewell of Artphilia said the Millais painting inspired two fragrances: “The first captures the rain-soaked pasture, blending the aromas of freshly cut grass, bright spring flowers and other vegetation with those of damp earth and ditch water. A second Puig fragrance is designed to bring to life the experience of the younger sister, the lower half of her face half buried in her sister’s rain-soaked, musty, yet comforting shawl.”

She said the technology was developed for samples in perfumeries to avoid “oversaturation of the nose”, adding: “This technology makes for a truly unforgettable museum experience, considering how closely linked our sense of smell and our memories are due to the anatomy of our brain and that our memories extend beyond our eyes.”