Watts Gallery
Exhibition: Scented Visions: on view from 15 May – 9 November 2025
Watts Gallery – Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850—1915
Opening 15 May, Scented Visions is the first exhibition to explore the symbolism and sensory role of scent in 19th and early-20th-century art. Originating at The Barber Institute, Birmingham, it features works by Anna Alma-Tadema, John Everett Millais, Evelyn de Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and G.F. Watts.
The exhibition examines how smell informed Victorian painting, evoking morality, memory, spirituality, and sensuality. Highlights include Watts’s Choosing, where Ellen Terry chooses between scented violets and unscented camellias, and Lewis’s Lilium Auratum, showing women gathering lilies in an Orientalised domestic scene.
In ‘Seeing Smell’, works reflect a Victorian desire to visualise scent—once linked to disease and later to wonder. Alma-Tadema’s London Fog finds beauty in polluted air, while Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past connects the Thames’ stench with moral decline. Waterhouse’s Psyche Opening the Golden Box and de Morgan’s Medea depict scent’s drug-like power.
Scent and spirituality converge in two paintings enhanced by AirParfum technology. Custom fragrances by Puig perfumer Gregorio Sola evoke incense and rain-dampened shawls in Solomon’s Saint of the Eastern Church and Millais’s The Blind Girl—the latter imagining a rainbow’s sweet scent as a symbol of divine connection.
The exhibition ends with de Morgan’s The Cadence of Autumn, where smoke ribbons express seasonal and personal reflection.
Curated by Dr Christina Bradstreet, in collaboration with Artphilia and Puig, this expanded presentation includes seven new loans. A programme of talks and events will accompany the show. Antje Kiewell (AWITA member) and founder of Artphilia orchestrated the scent curation for the exhibition.
“Smell was seen as disease, memory, sex, and sanctity. These perspectives bring new depth to how we understand Victorian painting.”
—Dr Christina Bradstreet
“Perfume, like painting, tells a story—note by note, stroke by stroke.”
—Gregorio Sola, Puig
More info at: www.wattsgallery.org.uk/whats-on
