Blog: The ultimate sensory experience for art lovers

Written By Student Content Shaper Natalie D’Alurra

If you’re an art or history lover, you can’t miss Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, showing for free until Sunday 26 January. I discovered the exhibition myself when I was exploring campus one day. It seemed like such an intriguing premise: scent in art. I was instantly taken by the beautiful paintings, some haunting and others vibrant in their joy.

I spoke with the curator, Dr. Christina Bradstreet, to find out more about the exhibition and curation process. “The exhibition is the culmination of 23 years of research,” she told me. Even if you aren’t someone who typically enjoys looking at art, there is so much to learn about the role that scent has played in art throughout history and what that reveals about society during the Pre-Raphaelite period. As I learned from Dr Bradstreet, "The role of smell in these works hasn’t been explored before", so the University of Birmingham is lucky to have access to this art and her research. It truly is a totally unique experience, and I urge you to not miss out on visiting for yourself.

I asked Dr Bradstreet about which works inspired her during the curation process. “Millais’s The Blind Girl is for me star of the show... I loved being able to bring to people’s attention the idea of the ‘scent of the rainbow’ – the scent of fresh wet grass after a rainstorm, when the sun has just come out.” The painting is stunning on its own, but Dr Bradstreet worked with an impressive team of experts to create ‘The Scent Experience,’ which allows you to press a button that emits the scents present in the painting. I have visited many museums, worked at galleries, studied museum exhibition design, and I have never encountered such a unique multi-sensory art experience in an exhibition! Being able to smell the scents present in some of the paintings allowed me to engage with the work in a totally new way and appreciate the element of scent in art, which I had never even considered before.

I had such a wonderful time visiting the exhibition, and I highly recommend stopping by next time you’re on campus!

The Galleries will be closed from 27 January 2025 and will reopen in 2026.