Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 9780271092584

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Seeing Smell
1. The Fallen Angel
2. Art and Stench
3. Picturing Perfume
4. Smelling Pictures
Part II: Decoding Smell
5. Scent, Memory, Visions
6. Scent and Soul
7. The Erotics of Scent
8. Death by Perfume
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Scented Visions

Books in the Perspectives on Sensory History series maintain a historical basis for work on the senses, examining how the experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching have shaped the ways in which people have understood their worlds. Mark Smith, General Editor University of South Carolina editorial board Camille Bégin  University of Toronto, Canada Martin A. Berger Art Institute of Chicago, USA Karin Bijsterveld  University of Maastricht, Netherlands Constance Classen Concordia University, Canada Kelvin E. Y. Low  National University of Singapore, Singapore Bodo Mrozek  University of Potsdam, Germany Alex Purves University of California, Los Angeles, USA Richard Cullen Rath  University of Hawaii, USA

Scented Visions Smell in Art, 1850–1914

Christina Bradstreet

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Supported by a Scholarly Research Grant from the Association for Art History.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bradstreet, Christina, 1980– author. Title: Scented visions : smell in art, 1850–1914 / Christina Bradstreet. Other titles: Perspectives on sensory history. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Series: Perspectives on sensory history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture, with a particular focus on Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021061853 | ISBN 9780271092515 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Odors in art—History—19th century. | Odors in art—History—20th century. | Art, Modern— 19th century. | Art, Modern—20th century. | Pre-Raphaelitism. | Art for art’s sake (Movement). Classification: LCC N8234.O36 B73 2022 | DDC 704.9/49152166—dc23/eng/20220314 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061853 Copyright © 2022 Christina Bradstreet All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations [vii] Acknowledgments [xi] Introduction [1] part i: seeing smell 1. The Fallen Angel  [19] 2. Art and Stench  [47] 3. Picturing Perfume  [74] 4. Smelling Pictures  [97] part ii: decoding smell 5. Scent, Memory, Visions  [117] 6. Scent and Soul  [146] 7. The Erotics of Scent  [170] 8. Death by Perfume  [197] Conclusion [231] Notes  [239] Index  [264]

Illustrations



1. Max Beerbohm, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1904  [2]



2. Léon Henri Marie Frédéric, The Fragrant Air, 1894  [6]



3. Fred Holland Day, Hypnos, January 11, 1896  [8]



4. “Opera glass” perfume bottles, Sampson Mordan, ca. 1879  [12]



5. George Frederic Watts, Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”), ca. 1864  [21]



6. Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé), cartoon in L’Illustration, 1844  [34]



7. Viktor Schramm, The Perfect Scent, 1897  [45]



8. Viktor Schramm, The Perfect Scent, 1896  [46]



9. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Girl at a Lattice, 1862  [52]

10. John Leech, cartoon in Punch, 1858  [55] 11. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Found, unfinished  [56] 12. Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, 1859  [58] 13. Luciano Freire, Perfume dos campos, 1899  [62] 14. Edward Linley Sambourne, cartoon in Punch, 1890  [63] 15. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Pandora, 1878  [66] 16. Léona Marcelle Beaussart, Papiers d’Arménie, ca. 1890  [68] 17. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864–68  [70] 18. Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876  [71] 19. John Singer Sargent, Fumée d’ambre gris, 1880  [75] 20. Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne, 1908–9  [76] 21. René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, ca. 1909  [80] 22. John Leech, cartoon in Punch, 1855  [82] 23. George Frederick Watts, Eve Tempted, 1868  [84] 24. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The Three Perfumes, 1912  [85] 25. René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, ca. 1912  [86] 26. Jan Toorop, Women in a Garden, 1893  [88] 27. Henri Privat-Livemont, Rajah, 1899  [89] 28. Alphonse Marie Mucha, poster advertising “Chocolat idéal,” 1897  [91] 29. Luigi Russolo, Profumo, 1910  [92] 30. Béla Takách von Gyongos-Halasz, Incense, ca. 1910  [94] 31. John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–56  [118] 32. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Proserpine, 1880  [120] 33. John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–86  [121]

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Illustrations

34. George Dalziel, after George John Pinwell, The Sisters, 1871  [124] 35. George Dunlop Leslie, Pot Pourri, 1874  [127] 36. Herbert Draper, Pot Pourri, 1897  [129] 37. Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–70  [132] 38. Silvestro Lega, Eleonora Tommasi, 1885  [135] 39. Advertisement for Lundborg’s Heather of the Links, 1898  [139] 40. Thomas Maybank, poster for Grossmith’s Shem-el-Nessim, ca. 1906  [140] 41. Song sheet cover illustrated by V. Gardien, ca. 1895  [141] 42. John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl, 1854–56  [149] 43. Simeon Solomon, Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, 1863  [159] 44. Simeon Solomon, A Saint of the Eastern Church, 1867–68  [163] 45. Simeon Solomon, Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome, 1866 [164] 46. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, The Lover’s World, 1901 or 1905  [166] 47. Whitman Studio photographer, Helen Keller, no. 8, ca. October 28, 1904  [171] 48. Rudolph Eickemayer, The Bridal Rose, 1900  [173] 49. Maria Vasilyevna Yakunchikova, The Fragrance, ca. 1894–95  [175] 50. Charles Courtney Curran, The Perfume of Roses, 1902  [178] 51. Charles Courtney Curran, The Peris, 1898  [179] 52. Charles Courtney Curran, The Scent of the Rose, 1890  [180] 53. John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose, 1908  [184] 54. John William Waterhouse, The Shrine, 1895  [192] 55. Emma Barton, The Soul of the Rose, 1905  [194] 56. Edward Burne-Jones, Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose, William Morris & Co. tapestry, 1901  [195] 57. Helen Thornycroft, Narcissus, 1876  [198] 58. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888  [199] 59. John William Godward, The New Perfume, 1914  [203] 60. John Collier, The Death of Albine, 1895  [207] 61. Albert Artigue, Woman with Roses or La mort d’Albine, 1897–98  [209] 62. Anaïs Beauvais, La mort d’Albine dans Le Paradou, 1880  [210] 63. Léon François Comerre, La mort d’Albine, 1882  [210] 64. Gustav Wertheimer, The Revenge of the Flowers, 1885  [212] 65. Odilon Redon, Ophelia Among the Flowers, ca. 1905–8  [217] 66. John William Godward, At the Garden Shrine, 1892  [218] 67. Henry Siddons Mowbray, The Rose Harvest, 1887  [223] 68. Rudolf Ernst, The Perfume Makers, date unknown  [224] 69. John Collier, The Priestess of Delphi, 1891  [226]

Illustrations

70. Photographer unknown, Ruth St. Denis, in Incense, ca. 1908  [227] 71. Alphonse Mucha, poster advertising Lance Parfum’s Rodo, 1896  [229] 72. “Can You Smell?,” advertisement for Lundborg’s Famous Perfumes, ca. 1891 [232] 73. “The Wonders of a London Water Drop,” Punch, 1850  [234] 74. René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, designed ca. 1912  [235]

ix

Acknowledgments

This is the first book to explore the role of scent in nineteenth-century art but, like all creative works, it “stands on the shoulders of giants.” This book would not be possible without the scholarship of the titans of Victorian art history, including Elizabeth Prettejohn, Tim Barringer, and Jason Rosenfeld, and of sensory history, including Constance Classen, David Howes, and Mark M. Smith, whose work has done so much to shape my thinking. It would also not have been possible without financial support. I am grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Association for Art History for generous grants toward the image costs for this book, the writing of which began during a six-month postdoctoral fellowship that was also funded by the Paul Mellon Centre. Jo Baker, John House, Julia Griffin, and Watts Gallery supported me by providing accommodation during the early stages of my research. I am enormously grateful to Lynda Nead for comprehending my early vision for this project and for her invaluable expertise. Special thanks are due to Patrizia di Bello, Nicola Bown, Constance Classen, Kate Flint, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Mark M. Smith for their reviews of the full manuscript at various stages. Holly Dugan went above and beyond, providing extensive and invaluable feedback and encouragement. I would like to thank Donato Esposito for bringing John Collier’s The Death of Albine to my attention via a print from The Graphic, sparking my exploration of “floral suffocation.” Donato, Sophie Bostock, Amanda Brooke, Scott Thomas Buckle, Julia Griffin, Katie Faulkner, Abi Hiscock, Ayla Lepine, Nancy Rose Marshall, Matthew Morgan, Martin Oldham, Lizzie Ostrom, Nic Peeters, Simon Poë, Peter Trippi, Érika Wicky, and Amelia Yeates read and commented on drafts or shared sources and suggestions, and I am thankful to them all. Antonio Fiore identified Béla Takách von Gyongos-Halasz as the artist of Incense, ca. 1910—after I spent years trying to attribute it. I am also grateful to Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Colin Cruise, Hilary Fraser, Jenny Graham, Carol Jacobi, Anna Gruetzner Robins, and Sarah Turner for their encouragement over the years. Patrizia di Bello, Jane Desmarais, Cheryl Krueger, Christiana Payne, Alison Smith, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Lauren Weingarden, and Érika Wicky, among many others, have invited me to speak at conferences and symposia or to contribute to publications on this subject, and I have benefited enormously from feedback on papers given at scholarly events. Kaycee Benton and Ronald Berg generously shared archival material on Charles Courtney Curran, while Amanda Brooke took the time to share the Grossmith archive with me. Several private collectors kindly provided images for use in this book without charge, and Julian Hartnoll allowed me to spend time gazing at Waterhouse’s The Soul

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Acknowledgments

of the Rose. Tajinere Fregene took me to a contemporary production of Ruth St Denis's dances. Tony Bradstreet, Gerald Beales, and Jo Rhymer helped with proofreading; Melissa Baksh, Antonio Fiore, and Megan Flint provided invaluable picture research; and Jane Gowman, Maria Conway, and James Lawson helped with photography of prints and ephemera in my collection. Those at Pennsylvania State University Press, including the series editor Mark M. Smith, editor-in-chief Kendra Boileau, managing editor Laura Reed-Morrisson, production coordinator Brian Beer, and editorial assistant Alex Vose, have been exemplary in their professionalism and efficiency, and eagle-eyed editor Nancy Evans, of Wilsted and Taylor Publishing Services, has saved me from numerous embarrassments. Finally, I would like to thank my mum, mother-in-law, and friends, including Jo, Julia, and Taj, and above all Richard for being there for me. I am so grateful for the encouragement and support they have given me. I dedicate this book to John House, who believed in me and urged me to write it. Author’s Note

Much of chapter 7 appeared in “‘Wicked with Roses’: Floral Femininity and the Erotics of Scent,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 6, no. 1 (2007), http://‌19thc‌-artworldwide‌.org‌/spring07‌/144‌-qwicked‌-with‌-rosesq‌-floral‌ -femininity‌-and‌-the‌-erotics‌-of‌-scent. A significant portion of chapter 3 appeared in French translation in Christina Bradstreet, “Représenter les parfums par la peinture (1850–1914),” in Mediality of Smells / Médialité des odeurs, ed. Jean-Alexandre Perras and Érika Wicky (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021). Early versions of a very small part of the introduction and chapter 1 appeared in “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes: Sadakichi Hartmann’s Perfume Concert, 1902,” in Art, History and the Senses, ed. Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (London: Ashgate, 2010), 51–65.

Introduction

Smell is the sense of the imagination. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

At the center of Max Beerbohm’s cartoon Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden (fig. 1), a dreamy, droopy Edward Burne-Jones nonchalantly presents a flower to a kangaroo to sniff, an allusion to the painter-poet Rossetti’s penchant for keeping exotic pets at his Chelsea home. Surrounding this cameo is a caricatured cast of Victorian art world figures from the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetic Movement. Among them, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne impishly tweaks the white quiff of a prancing James McNeill Whistler and a larger-than-life William Morris pontificates behind Elizabeth Siddall, the languorous muse posing for Rossetti, all observed by a hawk-nosed, keen-eyed John Ruskin. For the dandy and humorist Beerbohm, playfully looking back on Aestheticism in his 1904 book The Poets’ Corner, the image of sniffing a flower and appreciating its scent offers a simple and direct way to encapsulate and parody Victorian Aesthetic sensibilities. Here, this simple gesture embodies several key concepts for Aestheticism: hedonism, pleasure in exquisite sensations, and a preoccupation with beauty; the vogue for synesthesia, evoking one sense through another in art, poetry, or music; and even the penchant for art, like scent, to evoke moods, emotions, and vague yet keenly felt associations. It signals the abundance of flowers in the paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones while pointing the way to the floral emblems of the Aesthetic Movement and Decadence: Oscar Wilde’s sunflowers and green carnations. At the same time, Burne-Jones’s mannered gesture points to the perceived affectation of Aesthetes, as ridiculed by Gilbert and Sullivan in their satirical play Patience (1881), while his gaunt and enervated appearance references the “fleshly school of poetry”—with its “weary, wasting,

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Scented Visions

Fig. 1  Max Beerbohm, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, from The Poets’ Corner, published by William Heinemann, 1904. Engraving. Photo: Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London / Bridgeman Images and Max Beerbohm Estate c/o Berlin Associates.

yet exquisite sensuality.”1 Above all, that one simple gesture of the kangaroo sniffing a rose references the prevalence of sensory stimuli, such as music and perfume, in the art and literature of Victorian Aestheticism, while aligning the aesthetics of scent with uncivilized animal behaviors and an unwholesome obsession with the pursuit of beauty. This book explores the role of smell in Western art and visual culture in the period from circa 1850 to 1914. It shows the variety of ways in which, and the diversity of reasons why, artists were inspired by and engaged with smell, and how they grappled with its visual representation. In doing so, it reveals how an attention to olfactory symbolism reflects aesthetic trends and historic concerns. Though often marginal in art of this period, olfactory images emerge across a wide spectrum of art styles and movements, including Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism—as well as Victorian Classicism, European Symbolism, Orientalism, American Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and Italian Divisionism—and across media types, from paintings to illustrations, graphic design, and photography.2 This book explores works across all these movements, and mediums, but gives central place to Victorian Aesthetic paintings, in the broadest definition of that term, revealing that the possibilities of scent symbolism as a marker of mood and ambience fascinated several key artists and inspired a recurrence of scent motifs in international art.

Introduction

3

Nineteenth-century depictions of scent have been “right under our noses,” despite the absence of attention to smell within art-historical scholarship. For example, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais produced six scent-infused paintings in an intense two-year period of work, the best known of which are The Blind Girl (1854–56; see fig. 42) and Autumn Leaves (1855–56; see fig. 31).3 Frederick Sandys evoked aspects of scent in at least five paintings, including Mary Magdalene (ca. 1859), Morgan Le Fay (1863–64), Medea (1866–68), Gentle Spring (pre 1865), and Grace Rose (1866). With their profusion of flowers, Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia (1864–68; see fig. 17) and Lady Lilith (1866–68, 1872–73) seem saturated with the scent of abundant roses, while incense smolders in Proserpine (1874), invoking the figure’s status as a goddess.4 Incense is a central motif in three of Simeon Solomon’s watercolors: Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost (1863; see fig. 43), Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome (1866; see fig. 45), and A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867–68; see fig. 44).5 Burne-Jones too explored smell and smelling in Woman up a Ladder Smelling a Blossom (ca. 1860), the Legend of Briar Rose series (1885–90) with its profusion of blossoms, and Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose, a wool and silk tapestry designed by Burne-Jones ca. 1890 and woven by Morris & Co. in 1901 (see fig. 56). Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose transgressive canvas The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888; see fig. 58) depicted Roman revelers suffocating under a tempest of rose petals, sustained interest in olfactory symbolism over a period of at least forty-five years, painting a multitude of images of women carrying or scattering flowers, or bending to smell them, in both his contemporary and classical subject paintings.6 Frederic Leighton, George Frederic Watts, John Singer Sargent, and John William Waterhouse each concentrated on the theme of scent in a small number of works, including A Noble Lady of Venice (1866), Choosing (ca. 1864; see fig. 5), Fumée d’ambre gris (1880; see fig. 19), and The Soul of the Rose (1908; see fig. 53), respectively. In this book, the “scented visions” of these and other British Victorian and Edwardian artists, including John Collier, Herbert Draper, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, John William Godward, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Albert Moore, and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope are considered within the wider context of Western arts in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, when, as historian Constance Classen has shown, artistic engagements with the senses took manifold forms.7 Why Study Smell in Art? From iconic nineteenth-century paintings evoking smell to kitsch photographs of swooning, lovelorn beauties, lost in scent-inspired daydreams, “scented visions” are instructive for both the art historian and the sensory historian. Whether they are well-known or newly unearthed and empowered by this research, the works

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explored here demonstrate how the wealth of associations around the sense of smell and the cultural nuances of specific odors furnished artists with possibilities for connecting with the themes of modernity. While it is more accurate to point to sporadic and diverse yet recurring pockets of interest than a “fashion for depicting scent in art,” an exploration of these works uncovers the rich cultural significance of the olfactory and demonstrates how smell informed the interpretation of art and visual culture in ways hitherto overlooked.8 It may seem ironic that smell, long sidelined by the privileging of the visual, is here explored through the discipline of art history. Yet, as paradoxical as a project on invisible smell seems for a visually oriented discipline, this book is important for art history. It shows how reconnecting with nineteenth-century ideas about smell, gleaned from discourses on the body and senses, hygiene, science, medicine, pathology, death, spirituality and religion, and so on, can prompt fresh interpretations. It also reveals how attending to sensory history and the cultural associations that cluster around the senses—voiced in countless forums, including soap advertising, physiology texts and public health reports, religious tracts, etiquette guides, travel accounts, and gardening books—can bring to the fore significant and previously overlooked aspects of artworks. Many nineteenthand early twentieth-century ideas about smell and smelling, such as the belief that smell is disease or that a fragrant flower can cause asphyxiation, seem outlandish today. Yet this contextual information proves vital for understanding “scented visions.” For art historians, then, this research exhibits the value of sensory history, demonstrating how it can inform and transform analyses of art and its critical reception. Equally important for sensory history, this research shows how artworks mirror sensory ideas and suggests an alternative, image-based approach to the discipline. From Academy showstoppers to graphic design and ephemera, the artworks explored here are interpreted in the context of what Mark Jenner calls the “period nose”; they have meanings that hinge upon an understanding of contemporary ideas about smell, such as the deadliness of miasma, the druglike effects of perfume, and the nexus of fragrance and femininity.9 These and other ideas about smell intersected with cultural attitudes toward modernity and, where they inform the subjects of artwork, they reveal responses to issues of the day. While images of smell pre- and postdate the period under investigation, “scented visions” from circa 1850 to 1914 are of interest for what they tell us about attitudes toward industrialization and the impact of technology; rural depopulation and the growth of cities; sanitation; morality; sexuality; mental health; immigration; race relations; poverty; education; women’s liberation; and faith and secularization. For the sensory historian, the visual analyses provided here demonstrate how images of the olfactory reflect and shape contemporary ideas, enriching our understanding of the cultural history of the period.

Introduction

5

The Period Nose This book focuses on the years just prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) and the fifty years or so that followed. During these years, a number of cultural shifts took place that make this an interesting and important time vis-à-vis smell and its influence upon the artistic imagination. The 1850s were a decade of heightened fear of smell as an indicator of both hygienic and social danger. With advances in sanitation reform and the advent of germ theory in the 1860s, this fear was supplanted by a suspicion of perfume, which was increasingly perceived as toxic and linked to mental and emotional instability and deviant behaviors. Literary historian Cheryl Krueger has shown that this perception of the toxicity of perfume coincided with the repositioning of the booming fragrance market toward a primary focus on women at a time when anxieties around women’s liberation were on the rise.10 The 1860s and 1870s also witnessed a gradual acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin had suggested that humans lost their acuity of smell in the process of evolving from animals. Subsequently, “the suppression of the sense of smell in humans became one of the defining characteristics of ‘civilised man,’” as the authors of Aroma have shown.11 Ideas about perceived correlations between race, class, age, gender, and degree of olfactory acuity resonated in philosophical discussions over whether perfumery could and should be elevated to an art form.12 Equally, they informed nineteenth-century artistic representations of smell and smelling, including racialized and gendered paintings of harem women perfuming themselves or white Western “angels of the house” making potpourri. Indeed, the abundance of “scented visions” featuring women corresponds with contemporary studies in which women were reported to possess a more acute, animal-like sense of smell and to be more susceptible to its pleasures and pains than “the more civilized sex.”13 I argue here that, in line with traditional gendered sensory coding and reinforced by the discourse on evolution, smelling was defined by art from circa 1850 to 1914 as an irrational, feminized pursuit—an idea underpinned by Immanuel Kant’s alignment of smell with the emotions over the intellect.14 In turn, the identification of women with smell and therefore with spirituality, magic, eroticism and seduction, intoxication, memory, dream, and reverie reinforced stereotypes of women as leisured and irrational. Motifs of daydreaming women or girls smelling fragrant flowers, burning leaves, applying scent, making potions and potpourri, performing magic, smoking cigarettes, shimmying to incense fumes, reposing by censers, or swooning and suffocating amid intoxicating perfumes proliferated across diverse styles, movements, and mediums. Whether depicted in a salon painting, a decorative daub, a magazine illustration, a photograph, a

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Scented Visions

Fig. 2 Léon Henri Marie Frédéric, The Fragrant Air, 1894. Oil on canvas, 100 × 66 cm. Private collection. Photo © Whitford Fine Art, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

song-sheet cover, a poster for coffee, or a perfume trade card, images of women and scent reinforced an ideal of feminine beauty as private and introspective. Under the guise of presenting the spiritual, romantic, or nostalgic “affect” of scent upon the female figure, and even of triggering the same response in the viewer, such images appealed to a prevalent male fantasy of passive, static, and anonymous femininity. While exalting female beauty by equating it to exquisite scent, nineteenth-century “scented visions” typically subject the female figure to both the objectifying “male gaze” and the “male sniff” by inviting the male viewer to muse upon her scent.15 Male artists contrast the miasmic River Thames with the moral pollution of the prostitute, emphasize the susceptibility of women to the erotics of scent, suggest the ensnaring perfume of the femme fatale, and evoke the eroticized death of an adolescent girl, suffocated under the scent of flowers. Moreover, “scented visions” often promote racialized constructions of femininity in Orientalist scenes—that is to say, images of a so-called exotic East, produced

Introduction

7

by Western artists for a European audience, that fetishize the culture of the Middle East and North Africa. For example, in The Sultan’s Favorite (1886), by the Spanish painter Juan Giménez y Martin, an odalisque reclines on a fur skin, surrounded by scattered roses, a hookah pipe, and a coffee pot, with incense fumes scenting her sprawling body in readiness for the approaching sultan. Sometimes, troublingly, they eroticize childhood: perhaps none more so than The Fragrant Air (1894) by the Belgian Symbolist Léon Frédéric (fig. 2), in which we see the sexual awakening of a very young girl overcome by the scent of cabbage roses, lilies, hyacinths, and tulips. Occasionally they do both, as in the American Impressionist Henry Siddons Mowbray’s The Rose Harvest (1887), in which exotically garbed young girls wallow and swoon among heaps of petals (see fig. 67). Such tropes were ingrained in the public consciousness and, while some women artists sought new ways to respond to the effect of scent upon body and mind, others reiterated the imperatives of the “male gaze” and “male nose.”16 Images of men smelling were rare but likewise colored by stereotypes of race, class, and sexuality. White, middle-class, heterosexual male figures are typically shown as intolerant of stench or else unreceptive to the pleasures of scent.17 In contrast, working-class men are shown to have a high tolerance for stench, as in William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal (1861), in which the foundry workers appear “nose blind” to industrial odors.18 Images of men flaring their nostrils to inhale tend to be limited to racist illustrations of vicious-looking “savages,” tracking on all fours, and Orientalist paintings of geographically nondescript, effeminate “Oriental” men sitting in a tobacco-induced torpor, smoking hookah pipes or watching harem women make perfume—their idle enjoyment of scent marking them as “Other.”19 Alternatively, they were homoerotic in flavor, with scent acting as a means of “queering the image.” An example is Hypnos (1896), by the Boston pioneer of art photography Fred Holland Day (fig. 3), in which a young nude man inhales the scent of a (scentless) poppy, the petals of which trace against his lips—a rare reference to opium-taking. Besides women, then, the most common protagonists in olfactory imagery were hounds “on the scent,” non-Westerners, and homosexual men—in other words, those beings then held to be less civilized than white, middle-class men and so thought to have an acute sense of smell. Symbolism and Realism As an irrational, feminized pursuit, smelling was a subject best suited to the irrational, emotive art movements that followed in the long wake of Romanticism, including Aestheticism and Symbolism. In the realms of fine art, the emotiveness of smell appealed to numerous painters seeking to convey inner truths and “vague and unspeakable longings.”20 Scent infused not only the art of Victorian painters working along Aesthetic and Symbolist lines but also that of European Symbolists such as Fernand Khnopff, Edgar Maxence, and Odilon Redon,

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Scented Visions

Fig. 3  Fred Holland Day, Hypnos, January 11, 1896. Photograph. Photo: The Royal Photographic Society Collection / Victoria and Albert Museum, London / Getty Images.

for whom the evocation of scent provided a means to express the inexpressible. In contrast, invisible smell was less often a focus for Realist painters (including plein-air painters and French Impressionists) who sought to describe visual appearances. Yet, as David Peters Corbett has shown, Realist and Symbolist modes of representation are not polar opposites but “points on a continuous range of possibilities.”21 Many paintings of the period share both traits. For example, the American Impressionist painter Charles Courtney Curran painted at least nine works of women, girls, or fairies smelling. These works fuse the Impressionist focus on capturing fleeting effects of light with a sense of transcendence, evocative of realms beyond the visual. As Classen explains, aesthetic interest in immaterial smell from circa 1850 to 1914 emerged in the context of “a widespread movement by artists directed against what was perceived to be the materialist tendencies of modern culture, principally scientific rationalism, industrial capitalism and bourgeois worldliness.”22 During these years, scent entered art predominantly along spiritual, religious, and mystical lines, as well as those of gender, sexuality, and the erotic. Artists directly registered pleasant scents in a wealth of images of women burying

Introduction

9

their faces in roses—images with sexual or spiritual overtones, or both. Stench, on the other hand, was typically excluded from the art of the period—even in Realist works that challenged the old equation of art and beauty. Though we might expect to find the odors of sweat, steam engines, filth, and fumes in pictorial observations of work and living conditions, foul odors were repressed into general tropes of contamination, closeness, and invasion of space in scenes of pesthouses, asylums, forges and factories, urban crowds, cityscapes, battle scenes, and slums. Stench may be insinuated but is rarely explicitly signaled, whether by sniffing gestures, glimpses of vapor, or, indeed, in the painting’s title.23 Similarly, artists rarely represented the smell of food, which, according to the Irish-Canadian novelist and popular science writer Grant Allen, was too utilitarian and earthy for the lofty realms of art.24 There are exceptions, of course: the plumes of black smoke signaling the acrid smells of industry in Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal (1861) or the rising steam in Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885). However, given that smell tended to be evoked more directly in images of sensuality and spirituality than in Realist images of “the great unwashed” and given that this project focuses on works where we can be sure smell was intended, it is the former that makes up the major preoccupation of this book. The Scented Breeze My exploration of the role of smell in the visual arts from circa 1850 to 1914 ranges across broad transnational horizons. I not only find fragrant imagery located within Victorian painting but also highlight the scented breeze that passed over swaths of European and American nineteenth-century art, design, and visual culture. By moving across a broad range of artistic movements and media, from Pre-Raphaelite paintings to Art Nouveau posters and perfume bottles, I offer fresh juxtapositions between very different artists through the discovery of shared motifs. In doing so, I indicate the value of drawing connections across the art of Britain, Europe (including France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and Russia), and America. Despite some cultural differences in perception (or, as the cultural historian Mark M. Smith puts it, “being separated by a different nose”), ideas about smell diffused across national boundaries, monarchical reigns, and the century divide.25 Indeed, a major payoff of this thematic approach is how it brings into focus crosscurrents within international art, which are obscured by place-specific studies of artists, groups, and movements. By exploring smell in Western art during this period, we see markedly different artists—from the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti to the Futurist Russolo—responding to similar ideas, sources, and motifs, in different yet connected ways, thanks to what Classen has described as “the global circulation of senses.”26 Juxtaposing Aesthetic, Realist, Symbolist, and Modernist works, we see how artists across movements reacted to seismic shifts in the “sensescapes” of modernity.

10

Scented Visions

As literary historian Hans Rindisbacher observed in The Smell of Books (1992), interest in the aesthetics of smell was not attributable to any one person or movement but resulted from a complex international network of personal and professional relationships among artists, novelists, poets, and other cultural figures.27 The artists and writers featured here enjoyed international networks and cultural awareness, facilitated by the relative ease of travel, the speed of new communication systems, and the global trade in literature, prints, and publications. Far from being insular, many held strong international profiles and studied and traveled abroad.28 They were well-versed in current trends in Western art, and their works filtered into the European and American consciousness through international trade fairs and touring exhibitions, the art market, public and private art collections, lectures, letters, travel, and word of mouth. Although “scented visions” tended to be intimate works, as opposed to the larger, grand-themed showstoppers singled out for exhibition abroad, participating at international shows raised an artist’s profile, spurring increased awareness of their oeuvre through subsequent books, articles, and reproductions. During the years 1850– 1914, cheap print media proliferated, and fine art journals played an important role in disseminating “scented visions” across countries and art movements. As art historian Katherine Haskins has argued, “art audiences were awash with visual stimuli” thanks to highly collectible and widely disseminated reproductions in international art journals.29 By all these means, visual motifs diffused far afield, with the scented reveries of Aestheticism, for example, becoming an important arena for contact with European Symbolism.30 “Scented visions,” however, were not just the domain of fine art. Rather, they emerged across the spectrum of Western visual culture and by the early 1900s appeared in journal illustrations, advertisements and posters, product packaging, trade cards, and even greeting postcards. An attractive item of ephemera might be quickly discarded, shared, added to a scrapbook, or slipped into a drawer, resurfacing years later. At the same time, ideas about smell (from scientific developments to poetic motifs) recurred in far-reaching sources. News stories that tapped into nineteenth-century fears around the perils of perfume could spread far and fast or resurface years later. Indeed, the sheer ubiquity of scent imagery, both verbal and visual, hampers the potential of tracing connections between motifs. Art History and the Olfactory Silence This is one of the first books dedicated to the task of rediscovering the role of smell in art. Why? As art historians Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher have noted, “representations of fragrant scenes and the act of smelling occur in images of all aesthetic styles and historical periods.”31 Despite the low status of smell in the hierarchy of the senses, numerous Western artists from Brueghel to Picasso have embraced it as a legitimate vehicle for artistic expression, often appreciating

Introduction

11

the very qualities of scent that have denied it conventional aesthetic viability.32 We might note the aromatic gifts of frankincense and bitter myrrh symbolizing prayer and Christ’s suffering in Renaissance images of the Adoration of the Magi. Likewise, one could point to scenes of the Annunciation, in which the Angel Gabriel brandishes a lily (symbol of purity) toward the Virgin’s womb as if impregnating her with a wand, its scent silently and invisibly penetrating the body with the breath, in fragrant parallel to the divine conception.33 Think too of paintings of Mary Magdalene with her attribute, the pot of fragrant ointment; of the fetor of the corpse in scenes of the Raising of Lazarus (signaled by the mourner Martha clamping a cloth to her nose); or indeed of God breathing life into Adam. Yet despite the long-standing presence of smell in art, its significance has been largely overlooked, with the exception of recent studies in contemporary olfactory installation art.34 The absence of smell from art history, which this book addresses, is a lacuna left by the omission of smell from twentieth-century critical and historical accounts, after Sigmund Freud wrote the repression of the sense of smell into the history of civilization.35 In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud drew on Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) to claim that man’s erection from the quadrupedal stance initiated an intellectual distancing from the animals. Elevated from the level of sexual and fecal stenches, man surveyed the landscape, prioritizing sight as the leading channel of the intellect. Bodily odors became less important for hunting food or creating sexual excitement, and this liberation from olfactory drives enabled the development of reason over base instinct. Odors, Freud argued, became embarrassing, associated with feces, menstruation, sweat, and other body fluids, and this led to a species-wide repression of the sense of smell, which in turn led to a decline in olfactory prowess.36 Freud’s voice was influential in generating the “olfactory silence” of the twentieth century, when, as Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott have argued, smell was “repressed in the modern West and its social history ignored.”37 The history of art as a discipline only emerged in the early twentieth century—a consequence, indeed, of the hegemony of sight—and cultural forces have shaped both its subjects and its silences. The Sensuous Eye In 1879, the decorative silversmith Sampson Mordan produced a pair of rubyred glass perfume and smelling salt bottles (fig. 4) shaped and joined to resemble a pair of opera glasses with the silver-gilt caps forming eyepieces and the bases mirrored to resemble lenses. Through this pair of perfume bottles masquerading as opera glasses, invisible, sensual perfume is rationalized and made knowable with reference to visual technology and optical science. Yet this is a fallacy. Holding up this parody of visual apparatus to the eyes does not enable us to see

12

Scented Visions

Fig. 4  “Opera glass” perfume bottles, Sampson Mordan, ca. 1879. Photo: Steppes Hill Farm Antiques Ltd.

perfume magnified or to understand its mysteries any more than it can facilitate viewing the external world. Rather, the sniffer, acting the role of viewer, is bombarded by the fragrance contained within, which takes him or her far away from the here and now into interior realms of memory and daydream—the visions of the mind’s eye. This object points to a nineteenth-century fascination with intersections between looking and smelling, smelling and visual reverie, and so encapsulates this book’s exploration of the relationships between sight and smell. When it comes to the senses, the years 1850 to 1914 have been predominantly associated with visual modernity—with billboards and gaslighting, microscopes and cameras; with the kinetic—with trains, trams, and steam-liners; and, of course, with bringing the two together in early cinema.38 Here, however, I explore the perceived affinities between the olfactory and the visual, arguing that in an age of ocularcentrism, artists—along with scientists and writers—frequently framed smell in visual terms. Artistic attempts to visualize smell sit within the context of a widespread popular and scientific impulse to render the invisible visible and so easier to know and control.39 The desire to see smell or give it visual form manifested itself in myriad ways. The artistic impetus to translate olfactory sensations into visual form tells not only of the contemporary

Introduction

13

fascination with synesthesia and the potential for one sense impression to stimulate another but also of the deep-rooted belief in sight as the sense that makes sense of everything. By looking at art through scented lenses, this book aims to restore the sensuousness of the eye. Twentieth-century Modernist artists and critics such as Clement Greenberg were influential in segmenting the senses and restricting aesthetic experience in the visual arts to sight alone. According to art historian Caroline Jones, the young Greenberg suffered immense shame concerning his body odor. For him, “smell was part of a world of unconstrained animality, compulsive sexuality, and anal regression. Scent summoned a doggy terrain of rumps and musks,” sparking his determination to repress the sense of smell by championing art’s ocularity above all else.40 Today, Greenberg’s segregation of the senses still informs and limits the way we look at and think about art. Yet is this Modernist approach to looking at art the best way to consider Victorian Aestheticism and other paintings created with a synesthetic approach to looking in mind? In turn-of-the-century Britain, advocates of Modernism, with its clean lines and pure aesthetic, reacted against the sensuous intensity of Aestheticism, including the scents, music, colors, and textures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and what the critic Roger Fry dubbed Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “highly scented soap.”41 Here, however, I invite a sensorial reconnection with pictures designed to be experienced through the five senses. In Sensual Relations (2003), the anthropologist David Howes urged researchers to “break free from the spell of the specular and look, not beyond their noses, but at their noses.” Influenced by Jacques Derrida, who argued that Western privileging of the senses of sight and hearing occurs through the stripping away of their sensuousness, Howes suggested that a more nuanced understanding could come from studying the relationships among the nonvisual senses. He reinstated this call in Ways of Sensing (2014), cowritten with Classen, in which the title gestures toward “the plurality of sensory practices in different cultures and historical periods” and “the manifold relations among the different senses,” reminding us that, despite John Berger’s iconic book, “seeing” is not the only way to experience art.42 Today, appreciation of this approach is growing. In 2010, the sensory historian Mark M. Smith noted that “historians have begun to tackle the history of intersensoriality—how the senses worked together and in concert, not in isolation,” while art historian Simon Shaw-Miller championed a sensory approach to the discipline of art history, arguing that the senses are interconnected and work in tandem with the imagination.43 Since then, Ian Heywood has suggested in Sensory Arts and Design (2017) that, “when separated” in works of art, the senses “call out, appeal to and echo one another.”44 While the recent focus on sound, taste, touch, and smell to the exclusion of vision has helped destabilize the hegemony of the visual, we can now envisage studies of art and visual culture that explore relationships between all five senses on a

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Scented Visions

more equal footing. This includes studies of nonvisual as well as visual artworks that depict sensory experiences. This book signals the multisensory nature of both the artistic imagination and the “viewing” experience from circa 1850 to 1914. Like looking past the tip of one’s nose, it focuses on the nose and beyond— on visions inspired by scent and scents inspired by the visual. The Rise of Sensuous Scholarship A growing awareness of the cultural and aesthetic significance of the nonvisual senses is due in part to the emergence of the wider field of “visual culture” and its inclusion within art history. The formidable literature generated in recent years on the cultural construction of sight and the semiotics of visual representation has prompted a parallel awareness of the lack of a comparable discourse on the relevance of the nonvisual senses for the appreciation and understanding of the visual arts.45 Classen first indicated this lack in The Color of Angels (1998), observing that art history’s traditional ocularcentric approach “begs the question of how the nonvisual senses may have been theorized and evoked in earlier periods of art.” She later picked up this baton in Ways of Sensing as well as in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire (2016) and The Museum of the Senses (2017)—books that have inspired the move away from “single-sensed understandings of art.”46 It is, however, the art historian’s close critical looking and understanding of artistic context that differentiates the present study from those of sensory historians.47 In recent years, the hegemony of the visual has been challenged by a growing body of scholarship that places a new focus on the senses as mediators of experience. Ever since Alain Corbin instigated the social history of smell as an area of academic inquiry with the publication of The Foul and the Fragrant (1982), a history of smell in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, and Patrick Süskind placed it in the public consciousness through his novel Perfume (1985), there has been a move toward a more sensuous approach to social and cultural history.48 Today readers can feast upon a banquet of major, yet eclectic, compilations of sensory scholarship, proving that sensory analysis, can, as Howes and Classen have said, “be relevant to the study of any and all cultural fields”; these include sensory book series, academic journals, and a growing number of monographs delving into the meanings attached to the senses in a particular context, place, or moment in history.49 This body of scholarship reflects a “sensual turn” across many disciplines, including Robert Jütte’s A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (2004), Holly Dugan’s The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (2011), Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2015), C. M. Woolgar’s The Senses in Late Medieval England (2006), Mark

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Bradley’s Smell and the Ancient Senses (2014), and Aimée Boutin’s City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (2015), among many others.50 As art historian Jenni Lauwrens proclaimed in 2012, “it is no longer feasible that art history limit its inquiry to the visual field alone.”51 Ian Heywood’s Sensory Arts and Design (2017), Francesca Bacci’s Art and the Senses (2011), and Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas’s Art, History and the Senses (2010) have all brought art into the realm of sensory history.52 Moreover, the growing phenomenon of contemporary olfactory art has led to the emergence of a small but growing band of “olfactory art historians,” with Jim Drobnick and Larry Shiner at the helm.53 In recent years, Caro Verbeek has also brought “art history to its senses,” introducing smells into seminar and exhibition spaces and reconstructing ephemeral olfactory artworks, while in 2021 the Mauritshuis museum in Holland held its Fleeting—Scents in Colour exhibition, curated by Ariane van Suchtelen, to explore the aromatic connotations of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings.54 Within the field of nineteenth-century studies, notable scholarship on the senses has included Classen’s A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire (2016)—a rich sensory survey of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history and culture—as well as a growing number of books relating to individual senses in various contexts.55 Smell scholarship has emerged in social history, American studies, environmental history, medical history, and literary studies, including Mark M. Smith’s The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (2014), Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (2017), William Tullett’s Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (2019), Jonathan Reinarz’s Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (2014), Catherine Maxwell’s Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (2017), and Janice Carlisle’s Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (2004), as well as recent articles by Cheryl Krueger and Érika Wicky on perfume in nineteenth-century French literature.56 While the sociologists Classen, Howes, and Synnott broke the “olfactory silence” leading to the excavation of these and other lost sensory histories, the potential of sociocultural sensuous scholarship to stimulate richer, book-length readings of art remains largely unrealized. This book, therefore, plays an important role in revealing the research potential of uncovering olfactory cultural connotations and their influence upon the conception and reception of art.

pa r t i

S e eing Smell

Chapter 1

The Fallen Angel

Sounds may be analysed and set down by notation, as in music, but who shall analyse and give to us a chromatic scale, so to speak, of the thousand and one whiffs of fragrance, or the myriads of odour waves that bombard the nose? —Frederick Burbidge, The Book of the Scented Garden, 1905

There is, the writer Helen Keller lamented in The World I Live In, “something of the fallen angel” about the sense of smell that “does not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters.” Both foul and fragrant, sensual and spiritual, its place in Western culture is fraught with contradiction: “When it woos us with woodland scents and beguiles us with the fragrance of lovely gardens, it is admitted frankly to our discourse. But when it gives us warning of something noxious in our vicinity, it is treated as if the demon had got the upper hand of the angel, and is relegated to outer darkness, punished for its faithful service.”1 For Keller, rendered blind, deaf, and mute following a severe case of typhoid or scarlet fever when she was just nineteen months old, smell was vital to her physical independence and mobility, her relationships and experiences within society, and her intellectual and emotional life. The reality of smell was rich and nuanced, helping her orient herself in space, understand distance and proximity, weather, time of day, and sense of place, and even ascertain the habits of people she met. It was, therefore, a far cry from the limiting dichotomies of smell as good/bad, pure/impure, or earthly/heavenly that had long been rehearsed in literature, art, and popular culture.2 As literary historian Steven Connor says, “smell is as

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Seeing Smell

it were, the hinge or Janus-sense; drawn downward to the lower features and functions of the body, it also looks down its nose at them, having an orientation to the higher senses.”3 Condemned for alerting us to decay, smell is always guilty until proven innocent; so strong is smell’s association with filth that if we say something “smells,” we mean it “smells bad” unless we add a commendatory adjective. Keller’s angel and demon wrestle in much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinking about the olfactory. Likewise, the “scented visions” of the period frequently register these dichotomies through the evocation of the foul and the fragrant. Trapped in purgatory between the material and the poetic, the perceived contradictory and liminal nature of smell, both sensuous and sublime, rendered it ripe for debate in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western art and aesthetics and fascinating to artists and writers. Choosing: Sight Versus Scent In Watts’s Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”) (fig. 5), a girl is depicted in the process of choosing between the luscious, showy blooms of the cultivated, unscented red camellia pressed to her face and the handful of humble, sweet-smelling wild violets clutched to her heart. An early, influential example of a painting in which the motif of a woman smelling a flower with eyes closed is the primary focus, this is a key painting in this nineteenth-century history of “scented visions.”4 With its glorious colors, fragrant violets, and motif of smelling, it places scent and synesthesia at the center of Victorian Aestheticism—just as Max Beerbohm later playfully showed it to be in his cartoon Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden (see fig. 1). What is more, the painting encapsulates the moral and aesthetic debates fought over the hierarchy of the senses, including the respective merits and pitfalls of the visual and the olfactory and the odorate and the inodorate, through the intricacy of its meanings. By framing the girl’s moral conundrum in terms of a choice between scented violets and unscented, glossy camellias, the painting riffs on the relationship between sight and smell and points to the relative value systems embedded within the hierarchy of the senses. Like many paintings discussed in this book, its meaning depends upon a web of associations relating to conflations of women, scent, and irrationality; the idea of female susceptibility to sensory pleasure; and the perceived integrity of smell as the essence or soul of matter. Choosing draws upon cultural parallels between smell and models of female sexual morality— that is, the perceived ambiguity of both women and smell as elevated and base, sensuous and sublime. By inviting the male viewer/voyeur to observe a young woman smelling a flower (and her intimate, erotic, or emotional response to the scent), Watts asserts and reinforces patriarchal ideas about female behavior and about what determines modesty and innocent flirtation versus seduction, transgression, and obscenity, while inviting fantasy over these possibilities. For the

Fig. 5  George Frederic Watts, Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”), ca. 1864. Oil on strawboard, 47.2 × 35.4 cm. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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Seeing Smell

sensory historian, Choosing also suggests the extent to which the moral and aesthetic debates fought over the concepts of sight versus smell, the odorate versus the inodorate (and by extension the foul and the fragrant), were beset with contradictions. It therefore reveals the place of these contradictions within the rise of the aesthetic interest in, and appeal of, smell in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, while Watts pits sight against scent as distinct entities, by staging this contest through the medium of painting, he reminds us that the senses work in tandem, not in isolation. At first glance, Choosing is an image of a woman lost in scented reverie. Yet this is an image not of reverie but of a process of choosing, and Watts designed the composition to emphasize this theme. Her hand pressing the camellia against her nose in the top left of the painting diametrically opposes her palm cupping the violets in the bottom right. With one hand held high and the other low, the figure’s action simulates that of a pair of weighing scales; the merits of the flowers in each hand are carefully evaluated against each other. In this way, she might even emulate the figure of Justice, traditionally depicted holding a beam balance upon which she measures the respective strengths of the opposing sides of an argument. Several artistic devices in the painting promote the movement of the eye between the camellias and the violets, sustaining the viewer’s contemplation of the choice presented. With her side-on stance, the figure’s right arm is foreshortened, and the hand holding the violets appears closer to the viewer’s plane of vision than the hand holding the camellias. This draws the eye “in and out” of the painting and back and forth from hand to hand in a manner imitating the process of deliberation. Furthermore, the painting provides ocular direction from point to point. The downward slant of the figure’s lip, nostril, and eyebrow and the fall of her hair lead the eye’s descent through the painting. The eye is forced away from the locus of the visual narrative, the point of intersection between camellia and nose, down through the painting to the lower canvas where, as it settles on the image of the hand holding the violets, a raised index finger points the eye upward again. At the same time, the string of pearls around the girl’s neck creates a powerful diagonal thrust in the other direction, driving the eye upward from bottom left to upper right. This emphasizes the division of the painting into two domains: the upper, presided over by the camellia, and the lower, by the violets. The upward slant of the inner fold of the petals of the central camellia, the major veins of several leaves, and the tilt of the figure’s jawline and upper facial profile reinforce this division. This reading demonstrates that the girl’s attention is not static but goes back and forth from flower to flower. Although her attention appears absorbed by the dominant camellia blossoms, we infer that the violets remain in her thoughts. The visual and olfactory determinants of the choice presented are likely to have been apparent to many Royal Academy exhibition-goers in 1864 because the juxtaposition of these early spring blooms presented a familiar set of ideas

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23

within both the domain of gardening and the symbolic language of flowers. For example, in Every Lady’s Guide to Her Own Greenhouse (1851) by “A Lady,” the competition for display space is discussed in terms of an appraisal of color versus scent. “The Violet has nothing grand in its appearance but its perfume amply compensates for its deficiency of show; on the other hand . . . the Camellia, which is most beautiful, is destitute of fragrance altogether.” To some extent, the dilemma is resolved by the author’s advice: “we may always be permitted to forego a little beauty for the sake of fragrance, but not to any great extent.”5 By presuming that beauty is a visual phenomenon from which the olfactory is disqualified, the traditional hierarchy of the senses, in which the aesthetic status of sight is more highly valued than smell, is upheld. However, in terms of the ideal ratio of visual beauty to fragrance, this counsel remains ambiguous, suggesting the potential for deliberation so central to Watts’s painting. The theme of “choice” or dilemma in the painting, with the violets and camellias defined as opposites, suggests a bipolar pattern of moral thinking. The appraisal of the blooms shifts easily to that of moral values: we understand that one flower will represent virtue and one vice. The painting belongs to a genre of Victorian narrative painting that includes Alfred Elmore’s On the Brink (1865), in which the juxtaposition of a white lily (symbolizing purity) and a purple passionflower (lustful temptation) represent the choice faced by a female gambler. Should she repay her debts through prostitution or face up to poverty? The question is unresolved, her life “on the brink.” As an entry in Punch magazine put it: “E’s [for] Mr. Elmore. She’s tempted to sin; / She’s fair. Will the lily or the passion flower win?”6 One way to interpret Choosing, therefore, is to say that the spectacle of the camellias, located high in the painting, represents vision, the most noble of the senses, while the diminutive violets, with their specific association with fragrance, signify the lowly sense of smell. In this way, Watts’s painting conforms to the traditional model of the hierarchy of the senses, in which sight is privileged above smell. Figuratively speaking, it has “the upper hand.” In burying her nose in the camellia, the female figure has made her noble choice. Yet by reflecting the intricacy of nineteenth-century attitudes toward smell and its shifting aesthetic status, the painting suggests a more complex interpretation. Aromas or essences (from the Latin verb esse, “to be”) are often understood as signifying inner truths, and in the nineteenth century, floral fragrance, as the essence of a flower, commonly symbolized the soul. Later, in the 1880s, this was to become particularly pertinent when the horticulturalist William Robinson and the artist and designer William Morris decried the soullessness of modern regimental or patterned gardens, in which vibrant, showy, and pretentious bedding flowers, such as marigolds, cultivated in the greenhouse for bedding displays, had displaced old-fashioned scented blooms.7 For Morris, the demise of the rambling cottage garden, with its connotations of rural England, was symbolically aligned with the spiritual void of the

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Seeing Smell

postindustrial, capitalist age. For him, scientific rationalism, materialistic tendencies, and bourgeois worldliness could not compensate for the loss of traditional values. Indeed, Watts may be pointing to Marxian concerns. The cultivated, scentless flower with its glossy finery, possessed by the girl in her superficial “show” of smelling, might symbolize the alienation of the senses in the industrial world, which emphasized property and “the sense of having” over a sincere appreciation and valuing of objects, fully experienced through the senses.8 Already in the 1860s, scent could stand for spiritual finery and true inner beauty, while petals were a recurrent symbol for superficial beauty and the body’s outward façade. For example, the anonymous author of “Flower Odors,” an article published in the Boston-based literary journal Continental Monthly in 1864 (the same year that Choosing was painted), describes how some flowers “look like their fragrance,” such as pond lilies, which “breathe forth the inspiration of the sun.” Others, such as the more modest heliotrope, “startle by the contrast between their outer being and their inner spirit.” Posing the question “If a flower’s soul speaks through odor, what of scentless blossoms?” the author suggests that the voiceless/soulless camellia is not irredeemable. Drawing on familiar Victorian tropes of disability and Heaven, the author imagines the camellia to be “dumb,” “mute,” and “deprived of language,” and hopes “in a more spiritual existence, we shall behold their very doubles, gifted with a novel charm, a captivating perfume, we cannot conceive of here.”9 Moreover, “in the vast harmony of the universe one cannot believe there can be any instruments whose strings are never to be awakened”—words that play upon the iconography of “Blind Hope,” which was later treated in Watts’s Hope (1886), in which a blindfolded woman is shown sitting upon a globe, plucking the last remaining string on her lyre.10 The use of olfactory metaphors to convey moral behavior was common in mid-nineteenth-century writing, with sweet scent prized as indicative of intrinsic moral value.11 A decade earlier, in his essay Slavery in Massachusetts (1854), the Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau (whose writings were “always on the trail of some scent”) used an extended olfactory metaphor to establish moral behavior.12 Pronouncing the Fugitive Slave Act or “bloodhound law” of 1850, which required escaped slaves to be returned to their masters, as “offensive to all healthy nostrils,” he compared abolition to the pure scent of a water lily and the repugnant reality of slavery with the noxious sludge at the bottom of the pond: “So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.”13 Despite the different context,

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viewers of Watts’s Choosing would have likewise understood the sweet scent of the violets as an index of moral virtue. Since flowers were laden with moral symbolism in nineteenth-century art and literature, the floral iconography of Choosing also has a strong bearing upon its didactic interpretation. In the Victorian language of flowers, violets were familiar symbols for modesty and Christian humility.14 In The Use of the Senses When Engaged in Contemplating the External World (1848), a tract by Catharine Lake for the promotion of female moral education, two female companions take a country stroll and muse upon spiritual matters along the way. The violet, they observe, with its “charming simplicity . . . [and] humble and comely array,” can be personified as the perfect role model for the virtuous young lady. Women should strive to be sincere and unpretending, avoid earthly gain and “seek to attain true simplicity”: they should emulate the “modest” violet, imitating the humility of a flower that “retreats from the gaze and hides its pure beauty from view.” Though the visual “charms” of the violet were “hid from many an eye,” its presence was made known by the sweet odor it exhaled.15 “Yes, unlike the gaudy tulip, that is gaily dressed, this retiring flower gives out a fragrance that gratifies the senses and affords a pleasure to the mind. If we spiritualize a companion, there are those who, like the gay tulip, possess beauty, yet never send forth the odour of piety; on the contrary, many of God’s dear children, who are poor in this world’s goods, and having little outwardly to attract the eye, are content to blossom in obscurity, and there in works of holiness and love emit sweet fragrance.”16 Watts’s painting, like Lake’s preaching, draws on a shared floral symbolism that is both visual and olfactory. While the Art Journal described the painting as “nothing more than the head of a girl leaning forward in the act of smelling and choosing a flower,” the basic iconographical interpretation offered in most of the reviews of 1864 was of a young woman torn between worldly vanities and a more modest, spiritually rewarding way of life.17 Her choice is between the materiality and pretentiousness of visual display and the unseen qualities—the scent—of the virtuous soul. In this context, the brilliant camellias lack moral substance, are “light on the scales” and hence higher in the picture, while the lowly violets, despite their diminutive appearance, are weightier and more substantial. The objective superficiality of sight, represented by the large, luscious, and brilliantly colored camellias, is pitted against the true emotions and virtues of smell, invoked by the humble, sweet-scented violets. Indeed, the Victorian moral code referenced in this floral juxtaposition was deciphered by the critic of the Spectator, who noted that “the ‘moral’ of it seems to be that she prefers the violet which she holds in her hand to the more showy attractions of the scentless camellia.”18 Given the contrast of the diminutive violets to the spectacular camellias, the indication of the former as the figure’s preference seems surprising. However, viewers were accustomed to decoding didactic messages within Victorian paintings. Here, they perhaps took

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influence from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which placed Reason, or the mind’s ability to make a choice, in the service of an objectively good end.19 By suggesting the virtues of fragrance over color, Watts’s Choosing raises questions about the integrity of the visual. Indeed, the theme of ocular deception is integral to the picture’s meaning. The central paradox of the picture—the action of smelling an unscented flower—was acknowledged in the Spectator by the italicization of the word “smelling”20 and in the Illustrated London News with the phrase “smells in vain.”21 Adept at decoding visual puns, viewers at the 1864 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition would have appreciated the implicit suggestion of the double entendre of “vanity.” The futility of smelling opulent but scentless blooms conveys ideas of temptation, superficiality, and pretentious materialism. Despite its rich surfeit of color, the camellia is not all it pretends to be, being odorless and therefore lacking in soul. Moreover, the act of voraciously breathing in the fragrance of an unscented flower could point to the insatiability of human desire and the futility of pursuing individual wants over collective needs. The idea of beauty as a mask that conceals an inner void is suggested in a number of nineteenth-century literary contexts, including a French tale in which flowers metamorphose into women. In the story, the female personification of the camellia is told, “You are beautiful Madam, but you have none of the true perfume of beauty which is known as love.”22 In The Garden in Victorian Literature (1988), Michael Waters argues that “throughout the poetry and fiction of the age, fragrance—or the lack of it—serves as an extraordinarily reliable index of general merit.”23 However, the iconography of camellias in the nineteenth century complicates this reading of Choosing and indicates greater ambiguity within the symbolic system than Waters allows for. Although the pose of smelling an unscented flower suggests pretense, in the Victorian language of flowers, the red camellia represented “unpretending excellence” and “inner warmth,” the opposite of what I have hitherto suggested.24 As Phylis Floyd has noted in her reexamination of Manet’s Olympia (1863), the camellia was a symbol for the converted courtesan, transformed by the power of love into a loyal mistress, most notably in Alexandre Dumas’s novel La dame aux camélias of 1848.25 She also cites Ces dames of 1860 by Auguste-Jean-Marie Vermorel. In this guide to the various stock types of “filles de joie,” the “camélia” is identified as a reformed courtesan distinguished by her devotion and fidelity to a single partner. While their “sincerity and disinterestedness” was often questioned, “Camellias” were “models of tenderness and fidelity.”26 At this point, we must consider the painting in terms of its personal significance to the artist, since the sitter was his first wife, Ellen Terry. Watts, aged forty-six, married the actress on February 20, 1864 (seven days before her seventeenth birthday), considering it his duty to “remove her from the temptations and abominations of the stage.”27 Since Terry is depicted wearing her silk wedding dress, designed by William Holman Hunt, the picture is believed to have been

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painted shortly after the wedding day.28 When considered in this context, we might read the painting as Watts’s private commemoration of the process, so recently undertaken by Terry, of choosing between a flamboyant life on the stage and a comparatively sheltered life as Watts’s wife and muse.29 Celebrating her move away from an active presence in public life, Watts re-presents her as a flower, with the fusion of the fragrant and the feminine evoking a hyper-image of passive, static, and anonymous femininity. Arguably, the painting conveys Watts’s paternalistic optimism that by relinquishing fame, adulation, and the degradations of the stage, Ellen, under his guidance, had opted to embark upon a nobler course of life. By casting aside personal ambition for the institution of marriage, she had proved herself a self-regulating agent or “actor” within her own life, making the rational and restrained choice, following a process of measured deliberation. Watts considered her career as a distraction, a false turn—like sniffing the unscented camellia— but by marrying him, she had found her way. Moreover, in choosing her mate, she has undergone a form of “sexual selection,” casting aside potential suitors from the fickle world of the theater for an older, wiser, and more stable partner. Instead of becoming a glamorous cultivated flower, bred for stage appearances but lacking scent or soul, she has taken the authentic path of womanhood, opting for the “natural” role of wife, with its potential for motherhood. Choosing was painted at a time when, as literary historian Regenia Gagnier has demonstrated, an important cultural shift took place. From the mid-nineteenth century, the notion of Reason as the mind’s ability to make “common sense” decisions to further the collective good was increasingly replaced with an understanding of rationality as the decisions behind an individual’s chosen path, irrespective of wisdom.30 Seen in this context, the painting warns against the perils faced by women in pursuit of their whims. The personification of Ellen as camellia/courtesan is pertinent given the contemporary notion of actresses as women of ill repute.31 Given Watts’s self-proclaimed role as Ellen’s moral champion, the model of the camellia as a redeemed figure seems a fitting metaphor for Ellen’s salvation from the stage. Watts presents her as a “Camellia” capable of faithfulness and of great devotion, her pearls evoking her heart’s purity. Yet if the painting marks his joy that she has chosen to conform to societal expectations, her lusty absorption in the camellias invokes a woman inclined to the irrational consumption of sensory pleasures. Indeed, by presenting Ellen as smelling the scentless camellia in vain, her ruby lips pressed against red flowers, her husband portrays a naïve and somewhat superficial girl in urgent need of moral guidance and purpose. While Ellen had opted to marry Watts, in the painting, the figure’s decision between the two kinds of flowers is uncertain, and the ambiguity of the camellia, representing both loving and unpretending qualities and superficiality and pretentiousness, suggests an unresolved dilemma.

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Despite the loftier connotations of smell in this painting, the pretense of the model’s pose (as if lost in scent-inspired reverie over an unscented flower) might also point to an association between the olfactory and female mental illness. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a growing clinical concern about the degenerative state of the olfactory lobe in civilized man and its relation to hysteria. In an article on olfactory pathology in the Lancet of 1881, Julius Althaus, a German-English physician and neurologist specializing in nervous disorders, gave an account of a woman who was often seen smelling flowers but who possessed no olfactory nerves at all: “Her habit of putting flowers to the nose was merely a pantomime devoid of special meaning. Indeed, one often notices women, especially those of a lively temperament, carrying flowers to the nose which are devoid of smell.”32 Since Watts is known to have held strong views about the insincerity of acting as a career and even its moral impact upon the female temperament, the charade of voracious scent-inhalation presented in Choosing might be read as indicative of his moral standpoint.33 Ellen was known for her youthful exuberance, and it seems that Watts interpreted this as mental instability, writing, for example, “No excitement of any kind must be allowed when there is a common habit of hysteria, and a pulse of 108!”34 Moreover, by juxtaposing the cultivated camellia with the lively tempered female, Watts drew upon a familiar Victorian iconography in which women of unstable temperament were compared to beautiful but fragile hothouse flowers, and the motif of smelling flowers reinforced stereotypes of women as leisured, emotional, and irrational. Ellen soon realized she had made the wrong choice, later describing herself as having felt “shrinking and timid,” the “girl-wife of a famous painter” among Watts’s illustrious Little Holland House set.35 Famously, of course, it was to prove unendurable for Ellen to “blossom in obscurity”: the union lasted ten months, after which she resumed her theatrical career.36 Scent and Synesthesia Watts’s Aestheticism emerged at a time of heightened interest in synesthesia, not least in relation to artistic and poetic responses to flowers, scent, and music. Across the Atlantic, in 1864, an anonymous writer for Continental Monthly waxed lyrical on the synesthetic qualities of “Flower Odors.” “Glistening in satin raiment . . . and distilling aromatic essence,” jessamine and narcissus were “akin to the waltzes of Strauss”; white roses “swell to organ strains” and oleander blooms “pour out hymns of mystical devotion.” Meanwhile, the saffron tea-rose, held in the jeweled fingers of a lady at the opera, is imbued with “the liquid ecstasy of Italian melody” so that the “aroma, floating round those creamy buds, vibrates to the impassioned agony of artistic luxury—to the pleasurable pain that dies away in rippling undulations of the tones.” Here, a language of motion, including “waltz,” “liquid melody,” “floating” aroma, and “rippling undulations,” conjures

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the spiral of Transcendentalism, an invisible, divine force flowing through and connecting everything.37 Indeed, with its poetic language, the author may well be the Boston poet and landscape painter Christopher Pearse Cranch, who, as a leading Transcendentalist and Unitarian minister, believed in a truth beyond the reach of the senses. His poems, such as “To the Magnolia Grandiflora” (published in 1857, the same year as Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal), are suffused with synesthetic scent motifs as a vehicle for accessing this higher truth. In March 1869, Cranch set out his “Plea for the Sense of Smell” in the popular arts and science journal Putnam’s Magazine. Here he argued, “why should not the pleasure we derive from pleasant and delicious odors be extended, enriched and elevated, till these winged ministers between sense and soul become as highly appreciated as music and painting?” Indeed, he daydreamed of galleries designated for multisensory experiences of art, with “vases of porphyry and alabaster and malachite, filled with rare and delicate essences distilled from flowers and herbs and precious woods so that visitors may inhale from them as they take glances at fine pictures.” Calling for “galleries for the exhibition of perfumes, as for pictures and statues,” he reflected: “shall an artist paint you a rose and call it a work of art, and shall not the aromatician who preserves this most delicious of all perfumes, be worthy of some honour as an artist?” Such an art held both aesthetic and didactic appeal. Since “sweet and rare odors are as beautiful in their way as the glow of sunsets, or the dreamy sheen of moonlights, or the sounds of music,” they belong, he suggested, to both the “regions of science and art.” “A fragrance that sets you dreaming of youth and sunshine and beauty and evokes the same vague and unspeakable longings as are stirred by the strains of Beethoven or Mozart, or the colors of Claude and Titian, has a legitimate place in the world of art,” he maintained. They have a role to play, both as “sources of sensuous pleasure” and as “educators in the process of cultivating the imagination and refining the tone of society.” Nevertheless, he lamented, “The current age is too gross and material to put this high estimate upon the aromal [sic] facts of nature and art.” Only in some future utopia, “when grave political, financial and social questions are settled forever,” would there be “leisure to take up this long-neglected science and art of Aromatology.”38 Olfactory Arts and Aesthetics Smell is the underdog of the senses, so ingrained is its association with the irrational and the feminine, and with animality, sex, dirt, and disease. Smell has often been relegated to the bottom rung of the hierarchy of the senses and perfumery has never been awarded the accolade of high-art status within any Western cultural consensus. The refinement of “raw” smell, perfumery has been stigmatized for its connotations of sensual pleasure, magic, and ritual.39 In the nineteenth century, a host of arguments were mobilized against its aesthetic

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viability. Sight had long been perceived as the sense of maps and microscopes and privileged as a rational source of scientific knowledge, imperative to masculine pursuits of exploration, science, and discovery. Smell, on the other hand, was devalued as one of the least rewarding and disposable of the senses, associated with sensuality, femininity, and the emotions.40 Disparagements tended to be leveled at smell’s primal functionality, its irrational emotiveness, the paucity of our lexicon for describing and defining odors, the lack of a structural framework comparable with musical scales or color spectrums upon which to arrange a complex artwork and, not least of course, the repugnancy of stench.41 The writings of Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and others made prevalent the idea that the sense of smell was no longer essential to man’s survival.42 Olfaction seemed redundant, given that humans seemingly no longer depended on smell when choosing which foods to eat or whom to partner. Thus, smelling became associated with daydreaming and nostalgia, with leisure and decadence, with solo erotic thoughts and sexual perversions, rather than with industry, purpose, or the propagation of the human race. While some artists and writers dismissed the sense of smell as unworthy of artistic attention because of these associations, these same ideas captured the imagination of others. Panning out from nineteenth-century painting, artistic and literary celebrations of smell’s role in art and aesthetics were many and widespread. During the second half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, the power of smell to inspire the imagination also fascinated many Western writers, musicians, dancers, and designers, both mainstream and avantgarde. In particular, olfactory descriptiveness played a central role in avant-garde literature, from the fug of slum stench in realist novels by Charles Dickens and Émile Zola to the heightened sensations found in English and French Aestheticist and Decadent poetry and fiction. Examples include the fragrant poetry of Arthur Symons, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Charles Baudelaire and the cloying perfumes of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde.43 The fragrance of the tropics was also a recurring motif within Paul Gauguin’s writings on Tahiti, Noa Noa (written 1891–93 and published in 1924), in which he described the scent of Tahitian women: “a mingled perfume, half animal, half vegetable emanated from them; the perfume of their blood and of the gardenias—tiaré—which they wore in their hair.”44 In the performing arts, scents could be released into an auditorium or reimagined as music, dance, or opera. The German composer Richard Wagner did both, representing odors as “triplets and trills” while also releasing scent into the auditorium. In his opera, Tristan und Isolde (completed 1859; premiered 1865), rose scent evoked illicit passion, while the stench of sulfur in Parsifal (begun 1857; completed 1879; premiered 1882) was spritzed around the auditorium to convey what he disturbingly termed the “foetor judäicus.”45 Later, in Les parfums de la nuit (ca. 1908), the French composer Claude Debussy attempted the translation

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of fragrance into music as part of his orchestral suite Iberia, transporting listeners to the exotic enchantment of a perfume-scented summer’s evening in Spain. Likewise, his Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (1910) evoked a wave of perfume lingering on the breeze. At The Rites of Spring, performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1913, the stage curtains were sprayed with perfume.46 Ruth St. Denis, an American pioneer of modern dance, deployed scent and reimagined it in her solo dance Incense, in which she appeared swaying amid incense fumes, embodied through the rippling of her arms (see fig. 70). This act was performed as part of her series of East Indian–themed dances that toured theaters, vaudeville houses, and concert stages in Britain, Europe, and America from 1906 to 1911 and which she even staged in 1906 for Alma-Tadema and guests in his studio in St John’s Wood, London.47 The German American art critic, poet, and playwright Sadakichi Hartmann published his play Buddha in 1897, seeking to reveal “the psychological wealth of odors, the possibilities of an olfactory art.”48 The play, which was never performed, took inspiration from revolutionary French Symbolist theater practices such as Paul Fort’s mixed-media adaptation of Paul-Napoléon Roinard’s Song of Songs, held at the Théâtre d’Art in Paris on December 11, 1891. In it, “ever-changing symphonies” of perfume would seemingly waft from the vibrating strings of a lyre, played by the character of Nurva, the Magus of Odors. These, Hartmann wrote, would evoke a succession of abstract poetic images and moods in the imagination of the audience until “the melodious colors of perfume subdue the illusion of reality; and the mind, laden with scent, soars into unknown realms of imagination, where desire alone is law.”49 Hartmann went on to produce a perfume concert in New York in 1902 entitled A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, in which a sequence of eight scents, fanned from the stage, was intended to convey participants on a journey of the imagination from New York Harbor to Japan.50 Each scent was designed to conjure mental images of the journey: “White Rose to suggest the departure from New York, large bunches of roses brought to the steamer to the departing tourists; Violet told of a sojourn on the Rhine, Almond of Southern France, Bergamot of Italy, Cinnamon of the Orient, Cedarwood of India and Carnation of the arrival in Japan.”51 Later, in 1903, Alexander Scriabin began planning Mysterium, an orchestral performance combining dance, colored lights, projected pictures, perfumes, and smoke, as well as sensations of touch and taste. What these diverse works of literature, music, opera, and dance share is a fascination with olfactory symbolism and the power of scent to convey mood and meaning—a fascination that transcends differences in style, medium, genre, and national origin. However and wherever it was represented, smell was an important means of artistic communication, shifting moods and signaling meaning; a semiotic device denoting everything from the joys of spring to the sorrow of grief, and from nostalgia for lost innocence to delight in wicked pleasures. For example,

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in Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), the narrator describes Dorian’s studies of the psychology of perfume and his ambition to determine “what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination.”52 Likewise, in Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), the protagonist, Des Esseintes (likely based upon the French aesthete and “aromatologist” Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, Comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac), masters the “syntax of smells,” as “little by little, the arcana” of this “neglected” art reveals itself to be as “rich and devious as that of literature.”53 The significance of scent was complex and nuanced, often evoking a sense of “mystery,” as Classen and Howes have suggested, but more than that, evoking the whole gamut of human emotions.54 Nineteenth-century appeals for an art of perfume comparable with music and painting came from several quarters, including poets, writers, and critics who challenged the traditional marginalization of the so-called lower senses. For example, in 1886, the progressive art critic and dandy Félix Fénéon, then age twenty-five, petitioned for a “symbolism of tastes and smells.”55 That same year, he wrote his book Les Impressionistes en 1886 and coined the term “neo-impressionism” to promote the work of Georges Seurat. Fénéon, who also championed the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jules Laforgue and later became Henri Matisse’s dealer, was a barometer of the avant-garde, and his interest in scent is indicative of aesthetic trends. For Fénéon, the aesthetics of scent seemed innovative, even though leading figures of the French avant-garde had championed smell as early as the 1830s. In 1836, the twenty-nine-year-old Parisian art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger outlined his vision for L’art des parfums, claiming that perfume, like music, conveys its messages intuitively, and that “one can express all of creation with perfumes as well as one can with line and colour.”56 Later, the poet and perfume gourmet Baudelaire expressed a similar idea, writing that “perfumes tell of whole worlds of ideas” or “provoke corresponding thoughts and memories.”57 This was the spirit behind “Parfum exotique” in Baudelaire’s collection of poems Les fleurs du mal of 1857. Here, the scent of a lover conjures in the mind’s eye an imaginary island of paradise with dazzling shores, luscious forest, abundant fruits, and a bustling port. Inspired by physiology texts on “color hearing,” Baudelaire coined the term “correspondence” to express the experience of synesthesia. In poems such as “Correspondances” and “La chevelure” (which was added to the second edition in 1861), perfumes are filtered through the medium of sound, color, and touch.58 As literary scholar F. W. Leakey noted, they have “the sweet sound of oboes, the colour of green meadows, the cool freshness of children’s skin” or moods and intangible qualities: corruption, triumph, or infinitude.59 Rossetti and Swinburne, in turn, were inspired by Baudelaire’s metaphorical poetry, a key influence for Victorian Aestheticism.60 The term “synesthesia”

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was not in common use (medically or artistically) until a decade after Rossetti’s death. Nevertheless, both were fascinated by the phenomenon; their poems and Rossetti’s paintings invited a heightened multisensory response through the evocation of color, perfume, music, flesh, and fabrics. Writing in the Spectator in 1862, Swinburne was one of the first English critics to delight in the “languid lurid beauty” of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857) and its “dangerous hot-house scents.”61 In December 1869, he penned a letter to Rossetti in which he explained, “I myself, like Baudelaire, am especially and extravagantly fond of that sense and susceptible to it.”62 Later, the writings of Walter Pater held a powerful resonance for Victorian Aestheticism. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), he reflected on aesthetic value as the power of experiences to stir the senses, be that “strange flowers and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.”63 Famously, Pater concluded that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” suggesting that art, like music, conveys emotional nuances that cannot be expressed in words—the same idea that Cranch had earlier conveyed.64 The Music of Perfume Long before the poetry of Baudelaire and the writings of Pater, one article proved influential in promoting the aestheticization of perfume—no matter its ambiguous, tongue-in-cheek stance. In July 1844, the French journal L’Illustration responded to the gathering momentum for olfactory aesthetics by calling for “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique.” This was not to be perfumery but “a true art, elevated to the height of all others,” with a focus upon the “pleasures of the nose.” Describing art’s purpose as to “excite the soul through the senses,” “to awaken memories, excite feelings, and give rise to vivid and profound sensations,” the author argued that the “nasal apparatus” could be utilized by artists “to transmit to the soul, emotions of any kind!” To accomplish this, olfactory scientists would develop a new field of study, along the model of optics or acoustics. Armed with this scientific knowledge, artists could dedicate themselves to the creation of new and “inspiring odour combinations” following set “rules and artifices.” Instruments would be invented that would “vary” and “multiply the sensations,” create “oppositions and contrasts, press or slow down the means of action” and “carry its energy to exaltation” or plunge “into a soft and languorous ecstasy.” Then at last, the author quipped, “the nose will attain its natural destiny and take among our senses the distinguished place that it already occupies in the centre of the human face.”65 As a feature, “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique” was a strong fit for L’Illustration. The paper took a special interest in broadening the horizons of art, with regular articles on undervalued art forms, such as Chinese drawings, medieval manuscripts, and naïve art. (Later in 1891, it became the first French newspaper to feature a

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Fig. 6  Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé), cartoon illustrating “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique,” in L’Illustration, July 1844. Collection of Christina Bradstreet.

photograph in its journalism, and then, in 1907, to feature color photography.) Moreover, as a pioneering illustrated weekly, it was renowned for its drawings, and since the subject of a new olfactory art lent itself to humor, the article was ripe for an accompanying cartoon by Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé), one of the preeminent cartoonists of the nineteenth century, who had recently joined the fledgling paper. The cartoon depicts a perfume concert attended by an elite gathering of male cognoscenti (fig. 6). Seated at a grand perfume organ, a maestro with a gargantuan nose is in the throes of a majestic performance. Every bit the Romantic genius, he leans back dramatically, his wild hair streaming behind him, as his attenuated fingers flutter and soar over the keyboard, apparently varying the

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emittance of perfumes—their register, potency, sequence, and tempo—to exquisite effect. Yet the impression is undermined by the scents marked on the organ pipes as “eau de vie” (brandy), “eau de Seine,” and “eau de Botot” (an old-fashioned mouthwash with an astringent flavor of ginger, gillyflower, and cinnamon) alongside the humdrum scents of cologne, lavender, and violet. Cham depicts the organist playing from a score, dotted with notes in the form of noses of all shapes and proportions. Around him, an audience of dandified aficionados applaud (self-congratulatory on their good taste and fine sensibilities), or, eyes closed, exhibit their enthrallment. One pretentious fellow stands on a chair to get a better sniff at the fume cloud overhead. Yet for all their delight in the cultivation of the olfactory arts, their enthusiasm is in stark contrast to the nineteenth-century norm by which respectable, white, middle-class men were deemed to be too highly evolved to pay attention to odors. Here, each man sports a ludicrously whopping nose. These range from the bulbous to the tuberous and include a Pinocchio nose, an aardvark-like snout, a hippopotamus-like muzzle, and even a beak resembling that of the duck-billed platypus. Moreover, with their long-limbed slender figures and dark tailcoats, many of the figures appear reminiscent of monkeys. Published three months before The Vestiges of Creation, Robert Chambers’s theory of the transmutation of species, Cham’s cartoon is suggestive of an imagined repositioning of man’s ancestral relationship to the animals. While a lone figure, gasping for air, hangs his head out the window, and a few others (with prominent but human noses) stagger away—overpowered and nauseous from the eye-stinging, headache-inducing perfumes—the rest appear to possess a more cultivated sense of smell even than animals. Two dogs have keeled over, stone dead, their legs stiff in the air. With a circulation of around 30,000 and a readership approximately one hundred times larger than Le Charivari, L’Illustration was influential, and the idea of correspondence between perfume and music posited in “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique” resurfaced repeatedly over the next several decades. Discussing the article some fourteen years later in his book Études et lectures sur les sciences d’observation (1858), the French physicist Jacques Babinet noted its argument that this new art of osphretics could sit on institutional public programs alongside concerts, theater, dance, and exhibitions.66 This became a recurring notion in reflections upon the aesthetics of scent, such as Cranch’s “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” at a time when, as Classen has observed, there was a proliferation of spaces, such as art galleries and concert halls, dedicated to the enjoyment of a single, isolated sense.67 Much later, in 1891, the Reverend Llewellyn Bullock published an article in the National Review about his desire to raise “The Fine Art of Fragrance” to its proper place in the system of aesthetics.68 Here Bullock advocated the “artistic education of the masses” with regard to the sense of smell, noting that “moral degradation . . . [stems from] neglecting the esthetic capabilities of the mind.” “Already they have their People’s Palaces, their free

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popular concerts, their cetera. [sic] But a great good work yet remains; the removal of that terrible bane of the poorer quarters in our teeming towns and cities— foul, contaminating smell; this and the introduction of the blessing of refining fragrance.”69 A few days later, a writer for the Pall Mall Gazette playfully imagined a program of perfume-based social instruction. Referring to the working men’s concerts and exhibitions held across London by Congregationalists and social reformers such as Octavia Hill, he remarked: “at this rate we may expect before long to have appended to the ‘Gospel of Pictures and Pianos’ a chapter on Perfumes, and to see the Whitechapel Exhibition and the Dinner-hour Concerts supplemented by a Collection of Choice Odours.”70 Another key theme within “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique” was that of perfume corresponding with music and deserving to be held on a par with it. “Scent : music” analogies were common during the nineteenth century. Most famously, George William Septimus Piesse, founder of the Paris and Londonbased perfumery Piesse and Lubin, attempted to classify smells, like musical notes, according to their “pitch.” He classified individual scents and “bouquets” in terms of their supposed correspondence with musical notes and harmonies and called his system the “odorphone.” In the third edition (1862) of The Art of Perfumery, he argued, “scents like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain defined degrees. There is, as it were, an octave of odours like an octave in music. Certain odours coincide like the keys of an instrument.” For example, violet corresponded with the note D (the first space below the clef) while ambergris, which has a sharper (higher) smell, corresponded with the note F. A “bouquet” of sunflower, vanilla, and orange blossom created a perfect harmony, while laurel, pink, and thyme equaled dissonance. The C chord in the treble clef would be composed of rose, acacia, orange flower, and camphor. An accompanying illustration showed odor scales, correlating with notation on a musical stave, with one-half of the odors in each clef and extending above and below the lines. A music of perfume, this notation seemingly offered a visual means for registering, “playing,” and “sight reading” scents.71 The novelty of the “odorphone” lingered in the popular imagination for decades; Piesse’s The Art of Perfumery stayed in print until 1891. It was perhaps an inspiration for the scent organ in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and before that the liqueur cask mouth organ in Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), in which Des Esseintes plays “silent melodies on his tongue,” hearing in his mouth “solos of crème de menthe and duos of vespetro and of rum.”72 In 1894, the decorative arts curator and writer Edward Dillon wrote in his article “A Neglected Sense,” for the British literary magazine Nineteenth Century, that “more than one ingenious person” had attempted to construct “a scale of perfumes, finding parallels between different scents and the notes of an octave.” He suggested that correspondences between sound and scent occurred because, like sound, the mechanism of the sense of smell hinged upon “some form of

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vibratory movement”—here stimulating the olfactory nerve. He observed, “there are indeed, points of reference between the terminations of the olfactory nerve on the surface of the mucous membrane which lines the passages at the back of the nose, and the arrangement at the end of the nerve of hearing known as the organ of Corti.”73 His reasoning: if the nose functioned similarly to the ear, then why should smell not be as noble as sound in the hierarchy of the senses, boasting its own art form? While the “odorphone” was, according to the American perfumer William Henry, nothing but “perfect nonsense and humbug”—a marketing ploy for Piesse and Lubin—scientists, meanwhile, sought a systematic nomenclature for smell.74 Yet while nature yielded its secrets in countless fields of human knowledge, smell resisted classification. Efforts to group smells according to their chemical composition, intensity, or molecular vibration range were unsuccessful or lacked scientific consensus, defying arrangement in spectra or octaves.75 The French physiologist Fernand Papillon believed them to be unrelated phenomena, explaining in his article “Odors and Life,” published in Popular Science Monthly (1874): “if the harmony of colour and sounds exists, it is because optics and acoustics are exact sciences, and harmony in this case is reduced to numerical relations determined in a positive way. These relations, as concerns odours, can have no other basis than a capricious and relative sensibility. They are thus incapable of being reduced to form, a fortiori of being translated into fixed precepts.”76 The Dutch osphresiologist Hendrik Zwaardemaker later observed in L’année psychologique (1898) that “smell yields us no distinct ideas grouped in regular order, still less that are fixed in the memory as a grammatical discipline.”77 Without such a framework upon which to peg an “arrangement” of perfume, any attempt would result in chaos, as evoked in Images from the Future (1875), a short story by the German writer Kurd Lasswitz. Set in a grand perfume concert hall (or odoratorium) in the year 2371, the story centers around Aromasia Duftemann, a distinguished perfume composer, whose accomplishments on the ododium (an instrument designed in 2094 by Naso Odorato) surpass those of any musician who has ever lived. Her ambitions for this art of perfume meet a dramatic demise, however, when odorous gases combust, razing the concert hall to the ground.78 While for Lasswitz, the olfactory arts seemed so remote as to belong to science fiction, Hartmann attempted to bring fiction to life with his perfume concert, A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes (1902). Reminiscing in 1913, Hartmann reflected on the philosophy behind the event, noting the “persistent hints given by authors in regard to psychological influences of odors on human emotion, and the possibility of raising perfumery to an art of some pretension” and that his own work had been “prompted by a similar belief.”79 Yet, despite his lofty ambitions, the concert had been met with droll humor in both pre-event announcements and subsequent reviews. A critic for the New York Times relegated the concert to a vaudeville set, imagining a “patent smeller or olfactory manipulator” releasing

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scent by means of “a series of stops and valves . . . very much after the manner of an automatic piano player.”80 Anticipating a cacophony of stinks, they declared that Hartmann would be using “the piercing note of burning horsehair to suggest the high F.”81 The idea of an art of smell seemed absurd, prompting reviewers to deliver gag after gag about the aesthetics of industrial stench. The New York Times critic imagined a time when the art of odors would attain such heights of sophistication that “a zephyr from Barren Island may be rent apart by the smell expert . . . and, run through the Hartmann machine, come out as a rare sweet song.”82 The absurd suggestion that foul odors from the Barren Island refuse disposal sites, fish fertilizer processing plants, and horse glue factories could be reclaimed and refined for the artist’s use is typical of a wider disinclination to contemplate perfume as a vehicle for art.83 After the event, the critic gleefully announced, “Perfume concert fails.” Drawing on painterly metaphors, they suggested that despite Hartmann’s efforts to achieve “fine effects of chiaroscuro by the judicious use of light and shade in odors,” the outcome was that of crude blends, such as “new-mown hay and patchouli or lavender and onions.”84 By implementing the poetics of disgust through the imagery of pollution and stench, critics highlighted the gulf between Hartmann’s noble ambition and the abject nature of smell as an artistic media.85 Choking on the supposed delicacy of Hartmann’s high-minded vision, several reviewers rendered a scene of carnival mayhem. Odor, they made clear, was irredeemably low, being at best trifling and at worst ignoble, unworthy of a place within the spheres of High Art. The Art of Perfumery Contemplating Hartmann’s forthcoming perfume concert in 1902, a New York Times reporter dismissed smell as an “orphan and an outcast . . . the pariah among the five senses.”86 Nevertheless, smell was not confined to aesthetic theory or the fringes of artistic practice. Popular interest in challenging the hegemony of the visual, and the wealth of criticism this prompted, collectively built a climate of interest in olfactory aesthetics, the history of which is interwoven with both mainstream and avant-garde artistic production. Sporadically, between the 1830s and the early 1900s, Western writers—including but not limited to Thoré-Bürger, Cham, Babinet, Cranch, Lasswitz, Fénéon, Bullock, Dillon, and Hartmann—called for the olfactory arts. Yet without a doubt, perfumers were the most persistent champions of olfactory aesthetics, being tireless in their efforts to wed perfume to the arts. In London, Piesse and Eugène Rimmel (leading rivals in the mid-Victorian perfume industry) cast themselves in the role of nasal artistes—olfactory geniuses comparable to the finest Western painters and composers.87 At a time when smell was shunned as a topic for polite conversation and etiquette demanded that women wear perfume in moderation, perfumers sought to reeducate the English sensorium away from the “repression of smell.”88 Piesse’s

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The Art of Perfumery was first published in 1855, at a time of heightened levels of stench in London, and his project to elevate perfume to the status of an art might be seen as a direct response to contemporary fears around smell as disease. By the third edition in 1862, he had not only devised the odorphone but had also invented a romantic fictional character—one Mercutio Frangipani—a botanist whom Piesse claimed had traveled on one of Columbus’s voyages to the New World. Frangipani, Piesse maintained, was notable for having “spied” land with his nose by sniffing out the fragrant shores of the verdant West Indies, and for bringing back to Britain exotic perfumed organics, such as the tropical flower frangipani.89 Rimmel was equally inventive, allying perfume with the arts, for example, by sponsoring theatrical performances. At the Theatre Royal in Liverpool in 1862, “the balmy fragrance of a blooming parterre on a fine spring morning” was diffused around the theater during the scene of “The Fuchsia Bower of the Fairies” at a performance of The Gardens of the Never Fading Bloom by means of a Rimmel perfume vaporizer.90 Every year between 1860 and his death in 1887, the perfume house produced decorative perfumed Valentine and Christmas cards and almanacs, promoted in The Art Journal as being of “such merit that they might be readily accepted by the most fastidious of critics and Art-lovers.”91 In The Book of Perfumes (1865), Rimmel described his trade as an art of naturalism. He mused, “The first musician who tried to echo with a pierced reed the songs of the birds of the forests, the first painter who attempted to delineate on a polished surface the gorgeous scenes which he beheld around him, were both artists endeavouring to copy nature; and so the perfumer, with a limited number of materials at his command, combines them like colours on a palette, and strives to imitate the fragrance of all flowers which are rebellious to his skill, and refuse to yield up their essence.”92 Thus, for example, his Alexandra Bouquet (1863) was designed to capture the collective scent of Princess Alexandra of Denmark’s bridal bouquet of orange blossoms, white rosebuds, lily of the valley, orchids, and myrtle. Yet, despite Piesse’s and Rimmel’s efforts to align perfume with the arts and to perfect perfume as a figurative art, it was arguably not until 1889, with the release of Guerlain’s Jicky, that perfume came of age as an art form. With Jicky, perfumery shifted from being “a kind of photograph of a flower” toward abstract expressions of nuanced moods and emotions, or nebulous concepts, with avant-garde perfumers becoming olfactory Symbolists.93 As perfume historian Richard Stamelman explains, the new olfactory landscape of synthetically formulated odor-chemicals such as coumarin (1868), vanillin (1890), and ionone (1893) enabled “fragrances with no equivalent in nature” to come into being—“synthetic creations, objets d’art, inspired by human desire, imagination and the unconscious.”94 Huysmans had already envisioned this shift. In Against Nature (1884), Des Esseintes creates decadent perfumes suggestive of a “light rain of human essences” and “laughter in a bead of sweat, joys transporting themselves in full sunlight.”95 Launched in 1889, five years after the publication

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of Against Nature, Jicky was a cocktail of the new synthetic smells of coumarin, linalool (a chemical derived from rosewood), and vanillin, mixed with naturals— lemon, bergamot, lavender, mint, verbena, and sweet marjoram—and with real civet, musk, and ambergris as fixatives, and its name evoked its complexity.96 Iconic Guerlain perfumes followed, including Après l’Ondée (1906), an evocation of hawthorn after rain; L’Heure Bleue (1912), inspired by “the twilight hour” along the Seine in Paris; and Shalimar (1925), which “tells” the love story between the seventeenth-century Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and Princess Mumtaz Mahal. Far from being humble attempts to copy the scent of a floral bouquet, such perfumes were chemically complex, enigmatic responses to the visions and emotions of the perfumer/artist and expressive of the vagaries of human existence. Nearly but Not Quite Art Despite the varied appeals for an art of odor and the desire of perfumers to be upheld as artists, not everyone was supportive of the concept. Writings on this theme reflected a broad spectrum of viewpoints, including those who remained skeptical but were not prepared to discount scent’s aesthetic potential.97 Grant Allen argued in Physiological Aesthetics (1877) that “perfumery has never given rise to an art of any pretension.” “The true aesthetic arts,” he argued, “are more lovely than nature because they gather together all that is lovely, and omit all that is low, discordant or ugly,” whereas “a lily of the valley is worth all the millefleurs . . . ever manufactured”—millefleurs being a “bouquet” popularized by numerous perfume houses.98 An art must improve upon nature, though “sweet odours which are utterly unconnected with the organs of digestion, such as the perfume of a rose . . . and the aroma of newly-ploughed land,” come close to being “raised into the aesthetic class.” While these scents in themselves were unworthy of artistic status, he argued, poets and artists might idealize them in their representations. In contrast: “Odours which have obvious reference to vital organic processes (such as the smell of roast meats and fish, on the one hand, or of decaying animal matter on the other) have no pretence of reaching the aesthetic standard of disinterestedness.” Such smells, he argued (making no comment upon Dutch still life paintings, with their dishes of fish and game), were “inadmissible into poetry” and could play no role in art.99 Literary historian Catherine Maxwell suggests that Victorian “scientific and para scientific writers,” such as Allen and the physiologist Alexander Bain, “have almost negligible impact on the way Aesthetic authors—predominantly influenced by literary texts—think and write about scent and perfume.”100 However, this is not the case in relation to art writings from circa 1850 to 1914, where it is often possible to detect the influence of Victorian physiology. For example, in 1910, Sidney Colvin, the influential visual arts critic and Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum (whose 1867 article “English Painters and

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Painting in 1867” was the first to identify the Aesthetic trend in contemporary painting), accounted for the lack of “recognised arts of savours and scents” in his Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Fine Arts.” Like Allen, he suggested that it was due to their association with “utility—eating and drinking,” adding that “they yield only private pleasures, which is not possible to build into separate and durable schemes such that everyone may have the benefit of them, and such that cannot be monopolized or used up.”101 Following this logic, one might say that Sampson Mordan’s perfume bottle offers private, solitary pleasure, even as its opera glass design evokes the ideal of a communal stage spectacle (see fig. 4). Nasal Tutorage Reflections on olfactory aesthetics were shaped by ideas of evolution and the relative importance of the sense of smell for humans versus animals, modern versus primitive man, and white people versus black people. The pioneering French neuroanatomist Paul Broca first shared the myth that modern humans (and especially Caucasians) are “microsmatic”—that is to say, featuring small olfactory bulbs and a poor sense of smell—in an article of 1878. Having conducted a comparative study of olfactory lobe sizes in vertebrates, Broca found that humans and other primates have a flattened olfactory bulb that is positioned beneath the large frontal lobe responsible for human speech and complex cognition, whereas other mammals have proportionately larger olfactory bulbs, prominently positioned at the front of the brain. He concluded that man’s rhinencephalon (dealing with olfaction) was located in an ancient, derelict area of the anterior of the brain, remote from the frontal white matter of the “intellectual cortex,” and that, while the former was dwindling, the latter was gaining in size and power.102 According to Broca, the limbic fissure (the fine sulcus that separates the temporal lobe from the rhinencephalon) was almost entirely absent from healthy European brains but was discernible in some “idiots and imbeciles,” his contention being that the evolution of human free will necessitated a proportional reduction in the size and power of the brain’s olfactory bulb.103 This dethronement of the olfactory center was seen as an index of evolution that distinguished monkeys from man and Europeans from so-called Primitives. Allen, who was influential in bringing Social Darwinism to the attention of lay readers, also adopted Broca’s ideas in his popular science writings. In an article on “Sight and Smell in Vertebrates” published in the journal Mind (1881), he explained that for civilized man, “the special olfactory centres that once occupied the cerebral hemispheres have little to do with the main work of the brain.” Rather, they have been “supplanted by cells for the reception and co-ordination of visual sensations” and the “comprehension of visual symbols.” “Our world,” he argued, “is a picture, with a background of tangibility,” while the mental landscape of hunting animals could be thought of as “a series of continuous and

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mutually related smells, with a background of visibility.”104 (His essay “The Dog’s Universe,” published the previous year, conjured the “smellscape” encountered by a dog on a walk.105) Drawing on Broca’s contention that the limbic fissure had atrophied with the civilization of man, he suggested that this “indefinite and weak” connection accounts for the “curious and vivid associations aroused in certain minds by perfumes or passing odours.”106 Broca’s findings not only filtered into popular science but also into late nineteenth-century discussions on the aesthetics of smell.107 For example, the American music critic Henry Theophilus Finck weighed the case for and against perfumery as art in his essay “The Aesthetic Value of the Sense of Smell” (1880), published in Atlantic Monthly, a popular magazine covering art, literature, science, and politics. After much deliberation, he adopted the stance that smell “approaches very nearly” but ultimately eludes the aesthetic domain. Man’s failure to comprehend and harness the aesthetic potential of scent could be accounted for by the fact that the olfactory nerve is now “a mere relic of what, on the evolutionary theory, it must once have been . . . as in course of time, civilized man has relied less and less on the sense of smell.”108 Nevertheless, since “it took many centuries of experimenting before the youngest of the arts, music, became what it is now,” Finck cautioned against being “too dogmatic in asserting the impossibility of an odor art.” In a bid to cultivate the aesthetic potential of this sense, he advocated “nasal tutorage” through repetitive practice at identifying and recalling smells.109 In Huysmans’s Against Nature, the perfume cognoscente Des Esseintes undertakes this tuition, nurturing a perverted state of olfactory sensibility, in contrast to the evolutionary trajectory. Inspired by the trend for japonaiserie, several writers turned to ancient Japan as an exemplar of an earlier civilization that had cultivated the olfactory arts and had taken pleasure in perfume unparalleled in the modern West. In “The Neglected Sense,” Dillon defined the sense of smell as “the remnant of a once powerful mechanism” and lamented that scent, however exquisite, could never regain the importance it had held in “past ages and remote countries.”110 Having catalogued antique Japanese censers and incense accoutrements for an exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, he marveled at the Japanese art and philosophy of incense, known as ko¯do¯.111 In particular, he suggested that the game of ko¯-awase, or “incense arrangement,” had been used by players to hone the sense of smell and refine aesthetic olfactory sensibilities. He conjectured that the game involved identifying the constituent scents of different incense varieties, burned together or in succession, with participants deploying counters to indicate their answers. Since each counter was illustrated with an image of a musical instrument—for example, a mouth organ, flageolet, lyre, lute, flute, drum, or gong—he speculated that the object of the game was to make crossmodal analogies between the perfumes and the sounds suggested by the images on the counters.112 In his book Japan, Its History, Arts and Literature (1903), the

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Japanese language expert Francis (Frank) Brinkley described another version, which involved devising poetic names for the scents. The idea was to “listen to the fragrance,” allowing mental images to arise, and to translate these into poetic phrases, such as “moonlight on a couch” or “water from a hill.” Participants judged the beauty and erudition of these titles and the aptness with which they encapsulated the qualities of the aroma.113 While Dillon was fascinated by the synesthetic aspect of “listening” for the aroma, Brinkley was drawn to the Zen sensibility of beauty, with its focus on immateriality, transience, and intrinsic value. Both hoped a ko¯do¯ revival might spark a rise in the perfumed arts, though Dillon saw this as unlikely, due to the natural atrophy of the olfactory lobe over thousands of years of evolution. While Finck and, to some extent, Dillon saw value in training the sense of smell for the cultivation of osphretics, the reactionary cultural commentator Max Nordau (who came from Hungary, settled in Paris, and identified with German-Jewish culture) argued that this would defy the evolutionary primacy of sight and challenge the Enlightenment rationalist agenda. In his book Degeneration (1892), he too drew on Broca’s research but instead used the atrophy of the olfactory lobe as evidence with which to lambast contemporary olfactory sensibility as the mentality of “comprehensive drivellers” and “depraved sensualists.”114 Such a view was at odds with that of Charles Henry Piesse (nephew of George William Septimus and heir to Piesse and Lubin). In 1887, the perfumer promoted fragrance as a “distinguishing sign of higher culture” and argued that neglect rather than attendance to perfume would initiate a “relapse into barbarism,” because “when we begin to neglect or ignore any sense we commence a retrograde motion in civilisation.” Like Finck, he advocated the rigorous training of the sense of smell, since “the absolute loss of all sense of smell, or its complete neglect” would be tantamount to mental degradation, given that the intellect is utterly reliant on the senses for its information.115 Whether smell was seen as meriting reclamation through nasal exercising or as a redundant legacy from man’s pre-civilized past, more central to earlier or less advanced cultures than that of the modern West, the arguments and counterarguments around smell’s aesthetic merits, status, and potential were infused with evolutionary discourse. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued in “The Sweet Scents of Decomposition” (1993), “smells were cast as the vestige of animality in the human; as the emblem of savagery that defeated the drill of civilisation.”116 The Perfect Scent Viktor Schramm’s The Perfect Scent (1897; fig. 7) is one of the many paintings of women smelling flowers that followed in the decades following Watts’s Choosing (see fig. 5). It depicts a beautiful red-haired woman in an elegant drawing room, leaning toward a vase of flowers to inhale the scent of a rose. Sunlight gleams

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on the figure’s nose and forehead, making the act of smelling the visual focal point, while the pointed gesture of the thumb and forefinger holding the flower encourages the viewer’s gaze downward, to the space or air between the petals and nose. The haziness of the painting evokes a fragrant ambience, an effect achieved through thin and fluid application of oils, loose brushwork, and the pastel coloring of the furnishings. In referencing the scent of the flower, the title at once suggests lofty ideas of fragrance as a metaphor for the woman’s perfect soul and earthier ideas about her exquisite scent. At the same time, we are invited to imagine the figure as the visual embodiment of perfume, a recurring concept in “scented visions,” including Curran’s The Scent of the Rose (1890; see fig. 52), Paul Rink’s The Scent (1890), Auguste Toulmouche’s A Fine Scent (date unknown) and A Pleasant Scent (date unknown), Margaret Macdonald’s The Three Perfumes (1912; see fig. 24), and Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose (1908; see fig. 53). With her refined features, demure expression, and neatly pinned hair, the female figure seems the epitome of the “angel of the house.”117 The simple enjoyment of the scent of a cultivated, cut flower suggests contented domesticity and modesty of character, while the silver-silk embroidered rose pattern on her dress reinforces the popular nineteenth-century motif of “woman as rose.”118 The plush medieval-style dress denotes gentility, while its pyramid shape and brilliant blue remind us of Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary. Yet Schramm calls feminine morality into question, conveying notions about the complex nature of woman and depicting the female figure as passive and pure, yet with an underlying potential for deviance. An oil sketch for the painting reveals that the artist first tried out a more sensual interpretation in which the figure’s cheeks are flushed, as if the scent were having an intense and even arousing effect (fig. 8). Here, the modest pink roses of the finished picture are lusty red blooms, the sofa is upholstered with an exotic, hot pink, floral-patterned fabric suggestive of unrestrained passion, and the wall is rendered a lurid green; this contrasts with the refined harmony of the finished painting, with its dusky-pink sofa fabric and eggshell blue walls. Even in the final version, however, two opposing facets of womanhood are presented. Tender femininity is contrasted with the suggestion of a more assertive model of female sexuality, represented through the inclusion of a feral referent—the leopard-fur rug. The positioning of the woman’s body is ambiguous beneath the drapery of the dress, making it difficult to read whether she kneels on the rug (in direct contact with the carnal) or is perched on the edge of the sofa. Either way, as in Whistler’s influential Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), in which a girl dressed in virginal white stands upon a bearskin, The Perfect Scent suggests nineteenth-century notions of sexual and moral conflict.119 In both Whistler’s and Schramm’s paintings, the trampling of the woman’s feet over the skinned and subjugated wild beast suggests the taming of baser instincts. Here, an inherent carnality is implied, even as the male viewer takes on the role of voyeur,

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Fig. 7 Viktor Schramm, The Perfect Scent, 1897. Oil on wood, 61 × 55 cm. Photo: Burlington.

invited not only to gaze upon but also to sniff at the female in this intimate moment of private communion with the rose. Despite being an artist of some acclaim in Munich and Budapest during his lifetime, Schramm lacked international status, and his works are now little known. Nevertheless, The Perfect Scent provides a fitting close to this chapter because it plays upon the dichotomy of smell as both earthly and spiritual, and because its meaning hinges upon nineteenth-century perceptions of the conflicted nature of both smell and femininity. In nineteenth-century writings on the aesthetics of scent as well as artistic engagements with smell, floral fragrance was repeatedly associated with the soul and imagined as a natural or divine essence with an integrity contrary to the superficialities of urban and industrial modernity. At the same time, given the nineteenth-century association of smell with man’s animal past, artists and literary writers repeatedly posited the sense of smell as the primitive and feminine sense, associated with the backward, the barbaric, the disordered, the sexual, the irrational, and the diseased. In The Perfect Scent, the female figure is depicted as a hybrid of normative and nonnormative elements of femininity, embodying the sensuous and the spiritual, the exotic and the pure. We are asked to see her as “the perfect scent,” since perfume is itself an

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Fig. 8 Viktor Schramm, The Perfect Scent, 1896. Oil sketch on wood, 68 × 58 cm. Photo © with kind permission of Ketterer Kunst GmbH & Co. KG.

amalgamation of the beautiful and the repulsive, consisting of light floral top notes over heavy, often musky, animalistic base notes. As Steven Connor explains, animal-based perfumes “and especially those which associate sex with excretion, seem to lie—invisibly, but visualisably—underneath vegetable or floral smells, the dark faecal mulch, churning with worms, beneath the pretty, odoriferous litter of leaf and blossom.”120 Schramm’s The Perfect Scent works as the perfect metaphor for conflicted ideas of both scent and woman as the “fallen angel.”

Chapter 2

Art and Stench

Smell, whether agreeable or not, is usually allowed to pass unnoticed, and to give any thought to the cultivation of this sense or its delectation is regarded by the Anglo-Saxon race especially, as being at the best decidedly effeminate and the worst as something that is positively low. Indeed, it is not very good form to speak of smell at all. —Harry Thurston Peck, “The Morality of Perfumes,” 1898

Some artists and writers had a powerful reason for considering that the idea of elevating the aesthetic status of the sense of smell was inconceivable, even ludicrous, and that reason was stench. If olfactory art was to be the art of Utopia, as Cranch envisaged in his “Plea for the Sense of Smell” (1869), it was not to be found in cities that stank of sewage, coal fire, horse dung, “the great unwashed,” and, most disturbingly, of the dead.1 Those who endorsed the low aesthetic status of smell and its unsuitability as a subject or medium for art usually indicated its abject associations with bodily functions, dirt, and disease, which in turn connected with ideas of backward civilization and animality. While gross imagery has never toppled the visual from its crowning position within the hierarchy of the senses, foul stench was one of the most cited reasons for why the olfactory was deemed unworthy of a place within the hallowed realms of art.2 Compared to the profusion of “scented visions” from circa 1850 to 1914, which reached a crescendo in the 1890s and early 1900s, the olfactory played a lower profile in the visual arts from 1800 to 1850. While natural fragrance abounds in the Romantic poetry of Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Sand, there was a comparative lack of olfactory imagery in the visual arts during the early 1800s. One might say that the acrid smells of steam, hot oil, and coal were registered in paintings of forges and factories, just as the scents of cut hay, sea breezes,

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animals, and perfumed odalisques were evoked in paintings that represent a nostalgic or exotic counterpart to the industrial revolution. Yet rarely is there visual or verbal confirmation that artists were seeking to convey an olfactory experience. Depictions of the act of smelling were not yet in vogue, and painting titles rarely referenced smell. Likewise, there is little evidence to suggest that early nineteenth-century paintings were perceived in olfactory terms: references to the olfactory in critical reviews or in artists’ accounts are rare. While Corbin, in The Foul and the Fragrant, suggests that in the early 1800s the glorification of sensory pleasure prevailed almost universally in enlightened circles, this was not evident in fine art.3 As literary historian Nicholas Daly argues, the focus was on a “form of visual mastery that would render the city and the urban crowd transparent, while keeping the viewer distant from any too immediate exposure to the olfactory and tactile nature of the streets.”4 This is in keeping both with the privileged position of sight in this period and with fears around the collapse of social distance, which was most threatened by the proximity senses. In England, the dearth of smell in art from circa 1800 to 1850 related to the enduring teachings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy, who, in his Discourses, instructed artists to pursue “the idea of general beauty and the contemplation of general truth” over “sensual gratification.”5 Academic idealism in Britain and Europe in those years typically shunned the degree of naturalism that might endow a picture with heightened illusionism of the lower senses. In contrast, mid-nineteenth-century art registered conflicted attitudes to olfactory experience. As Corbin argued in The Foul and the Fragrant, the period 1750–1850 saw a rise in discernment of the sense of smell and a lowering of middle- and upper-class society’s threshold for stench.6 As people tuned in to the urban “smellscape,” fear mounted over the threat of smell as disease, prompting deodorization campaigns. During the 1850s, it was not “good form” to engage aesthetically with stench because of its associations with pollution, poverty, disease, and immorality. Those artists who evoked it, such as Stanhope in Thoughts of the Past (1859; see fig. 12), were rebellious, in the minority, and not without controversy. Arguably, however, the increased awareness of the sense of smell sparked a parallel rise in attention to the olfactory in art and aesthetics. Given smell’s historic association with disease, the representation of intense fragrances lent a frisson to paintings as diverse as Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–68, 1872–73) and Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876; see fig. 18), even as the miasma theory gradually ceded to germ theory in popular understanding. Meanwhile, the move toward naturalism in art (and the gradual rejection of Academic ideals) went in tandem with a heightened desire to capture sensory experiences, while the rise in Symbolism in the 1880s and 1890s tended toward the evocation of emotional and esoteric responses to the senses.

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The Venice of Drains Nineteenth-century cities stank! On traveling to Cologne in 1828, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge counted “two and seventy stenches / All well-defined, and several stinks!”7 For decades, commentators would declare that their town or city, from Sheffield to “Filth-a-delphia,” smelled worse.8 In 1846, Dickens described the harbor area of Marseilles as a “compound of vile smells . . . dreadful in the last degree,” while Henry Mayhew dubbed London the “Venice of drains.”9 During the 1850s, the River Thames was choked by the 400,000 tons of sewage flushed into it each day. Many open sewers drained directly into the river, and sludge festered on the shore at low tide, leading Lord Palmerston to liken it to a “stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.”10 While the Georgian invention of the water closet offered welcome “convenience,” the water generated with each flush was problematic. Many lavatories flushed into the city’s haphazard network of drains, ditches, and sewers. Designed to remove surface rainwater, these were clogged by much of the estimated 1,000 tons of horse dung dropped daily on the city streets, which slid through the sewer gratings or were brushed through by crossing-sweeper boys. Other lavatories drained into one of the city’s 200,000 cesspools, located in yards, alleyways, and even the basements of houses. If the brick walls of the cesspit were “clayed” with feces, the pit filled quickly and became noxious; if the walls remained porous, the liquid leached into neighboring property or into public wells, contaminating water supplies. For those without the financial means to pay for a night-soil man to empty their pit, the alternative was to upend one’s slop bucket into the gutter or into the street. Gullies oozed with raw sewage along with the blood, gore, and other waste from slaughterhouses and knacker’s yards, fishmongers, glue factories, and tanneries that seeped in; waste festered among dead animals, rotting vegetables, and livestock manure.11 Smoke, belching into the atmosphere from trains, factories, and houses, filled the air with soot and formed a thick, yellow, sulfurous-smelling smog— or “pea-souper”—which hung in the air for days during the winter. Smog-odor heralded the industries of a neighborhood. In 1852, the Whig newspaper Atlas mapped “the scents of London,” from the “putrefying garbage” of Maiden Lane to the “tallow-melting” of St. Paul’s, the “horse-boiling” of Haggerstone, the “human guano” of Stepney, and the taint of “white lead” that pervaded Hackney. Adopting the ironic humor shared by many nineteenth-century essayists on matters pertaining to smell, the author surveyed the smellscape while traveling on the London and South Western Railway. At Lambeth, he observed that “the laystall is succeeded by the knacker, who gives place to the glue-boiler, who is followed by some gas company—and how the varied bouquet is subtly penetrated and delicately diversified by the delicious fumes of ammonia and rare titillating acids.”12 Venturing into London’s overcrowded slums, with their

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ramshackle houses, unpaved narrow streets, and lack of ventilation and lavatories, the odors of chamber pots, cooking, dirty laundry, stagnant refuse heaps, and sewage were stifling. Personal hygiene was associated with the body’s public façade (hands, face, and linen), and until 1853 soap was priced beyond the means of the masses due to heavy taxation.13 Bathing facilities were minimal; often a family’s access to water was through a communal pump. At St. Bride’s Church in London, stomach-turning stenches are said to have risen from the paupers’ graveyard, where corpses were crammed into pits that were reopened and added to weekly, inspiring Dickens to describe, in Bleak House (1853), Nemo’s final resting place as a “hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene.”14 Vapor Vampires and Stench Invaders In the 1840s and 1850s, stench was not just unpleasant; it was frightening. “The loathsome odor of putrid matter . . . shakes our brain into spasms, and causes our very nature to revolt, and our body to sicken,” wrote an anonymous author in New York’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1856, drawing upon the widespread belief that smell was the cause of disease, and linking stench with the violent symptoms of cholera.15 The miasma theory, which originated in the Middle Ages and endured until the development of germ theory in the 1860s, maintained that cholera and other contagions such as malaria (from the Italian mal aria, or bad air) were caused by inhaling noxious odors thought to contain poisonous particles from decomposing organic matter.16 Miasma gripped the Victorian popular imagination. Numerous cartoonists and satirical poets personified odors as demonic specters.17 In autumn 1847, Punch featured a poem titled “The Vampyre: No Superstition,” in which intangible miasma is embodied as a bloodthirsty specter with a “venomous tooth.” The Vampyre! The Vampyre! Avoid him! His breath Is the reek of the charnel, the poison of death: He has broken his prison of pestilent clay, And the grave yields him up, on the living to prey.18 In the poem a “foul mist . . . over the sepulcher waves” and a “glimmering vapour creeps over the ground,” metaphorically linking concerns about burial, miasma, and disease. The miasma mist is imagined as a vampire infiltrating a nursery and biting into a baby’s flesh.19 Perhaps unsurprisingly, lead-lined coffins became prevalent as a means to contain and confine these “vampire” vapors. During the scorching summer of 1858, London was imagined as under attack from the intolerable stench of the River Thames. The Illustrated London News described an army of “militia-men” or a marauding “fleet from Toulon” rushing “up the streets that lead from the river to the Strand,” striking the kingdom’s

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central governmental and legislative systems, so that even the “mayor is besieged in court.”20 Punch, too, reported an incursion: “there floated around the doors of the Legislative Palace, an enemy, mighty, deadly, subtle and irresistible, threatening destruction to both Houses. That enemy emanated from the Thames.” The river led straight to the chambers of power at the heart of the British Empire, just as the nose provided a conduit for smells to enter the body and to commune with the brain. The river mouth was likened to the nostrils, while the streets connecting the river to the Strand stood for the nasal cavities by which odors advanced to the olfactory membrane and were breathed into the lungs, with devastating effect.21 All Smell Is Disease Edwin Chadwick was convinced miasma was a killer. A lawyer and civil servant, a devout Utilitarian and friend of Jeremy Bentham’s, he had been a key architect of the widely abhorred 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which made public relief in Britain a grim deterrent. His groundbreaking report on “The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population” (1842) linked living conditions and life expectancy and demonstrated that improvements in British urban health were far from commensurate with industrial progress. Exposing the low life expectancy of the poorest workers, the extensive loss of labor due to ill-health, and a monumental annual death toll of 60,000 resulting from inadequate sanitation, the report recommended the introduction of an improved sewerage system, mains for water supplies, and regular street cleaning. The economic argument was clear: the high death rate among working-class male breadwinners in Great Britain meant that, in 1840, 43,000 widows and 112,000 orphans were dependent on Poor Law Relief.22 “The Chadwick Report” was a call for action, and, although his “laissez-faire” opponents impeded progress, the Public Health Act was finally passed in 1848, with Chadwick appointed commissioner of the first centralized General Board of Health. Now any district with a death rate higher than 23 per 1,000 of the population over a period of seven years was required to form a localized Board of Health. These boards would oversee the provision of paved streets, clean water, and sewage disposal and ensure adherence to new housing regulations vis-à-vis structural standards and requirements for light, space, and fresh air. In 1846, at a meeting of London’s Metropolitan Sewage Committee, Chadwick warned that “all smell is, if it be intense, immediate acute disease; and eventually we may say that, by depressing the system and rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes, all smell is disease.”23 For centuries, pleasant scents had been widely believed to purify the air and ward off infection. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women protected themselves from the stench of the streets with pomanders (ornamental apple-shaped pendants, with segmented

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Fig. 9  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Girl at a Lattice, 1862. Oil on canvas, 29.2 × 26.3 cm. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images.

compartments) that they packed with musk, civet, or ambergris and wore on long chains that swung over their skirts. Plague doctors wore long, beak-like masks stuffed with aromatics, such as camphor, cloves, myrrh, rose petals, ambergris, balm-mint, and storax resin. By the nineteenth century, people of all classes still used scent to mask and ward off stench, whether by carrying nosegays (sometimes called tussie-mussies), scattering herbs in cupboards, or carrying a scented handkerchief. Fragrant flowers were grown in window boxes and on ledges to help sweeten the air, as in Rossetti’s Girl at a Lattice (1862), in which a flushed, even feverish woman leans out of a casement toward a vase of wallflowers as if gasping for fresh, fragrant air (fig. 9).24 Now, though, Chadwick cast a cloud of suspicion over “all smell,” including perfumes and mild, pleasant scents. Chadwick’s report “opened nostrils” to the perceived problems of stench. The nose, in turn, became controversial, given that odors were thought to influence

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not only health but also thought and behavior. In his famous essay Treatise on Sensations of 1764, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac argued that ideas, memories, and emotions come from a single source—sensation: “Judgement, reflection, desires, passions, and so forth are only sensation itself, converted differently.”25 He invited his readers to imagine a living marble statue whose senses are awakened in turn, starting with smell. Presented with a rose, the statue revels in the pure bliss of its scent and is flooded with feelings of joy. When the rose is removed, the statue recalls the sensation it has experienced. Introduced to the scent of another flower, it makes comparisons and judgments, awakening the analytical mind.26 Condillac’s argument: we are shaped by the sensations we encounter. Stench was widely imagined as having a drug-like, depressive effect, not only on the health of the body but also on the mood and the morals, and a correlation between foul air and vice was often rehearsed in writings of this period. A moral argument underpinned Chadwick’s 1842 report. Impure air bred immorality; the stench of the slums produced “an adult population short-lived, imprudent, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratifications.” In such conditions, “the decencies of life” are abandoned, spawning further “over-crowding.”27 In 1855, the London-based perfumer Piesse described slum dwellers as unmindful of the risks of “an atmosphere laden with poisonous odours” and alluded to their ungodliness by citing Psalm 115 in the King James Bible: “noses have they, but they smell not.” Such stench, he believed, would be an affront to the sensibilities of any decent person, who would “shun it, like anything else that is vile or pernicious.”28 Four years later, the journalist George Augustus Sala described the odors of the New Cut (a London street market by Waterloo Road and Lower Marsh Street) with its “fumes of vilest tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity.” This, he said, made “the night hideous and the heart weak,” vulnerable to criminal behavior and debauchery.29 By the nineteenth century, the senses were imagined as gates to the intellectual life. In The Christian Physiologist (1830), a mix of scientific surmise and religious tract, the Irish storyteller Gerald Griffin imagines the nose as a weak border control. Griffin observed that the senses are “gates by which all earthly knowledge—all good and all evil are transmitted to the mind.”30 The nose’s good intentions as a “trusty watchman” at the “city gates” standing guard over the air we breathe was not in doubt, yet concern was raised over its limited powers to “close the doors and exclude the bearer of a treacherous gift or a hostile challenge.”Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1856) set out three main problems. First, the passages of the nose that ferry aroma, breath, and mucus into the lungs were perceived as vulnerable inroads leading deep into the body. Second, any

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smell, however noxious, could enter the nasal cavities and communicate with the brain by exciting the nerves in the olfactory membrane; the alarm would be raised only on detection, when the contamination had already occurred. Third, the reaction time required to defend oneself from smell by pinching the nostrils or holding the breath was seen as too great in contrast to sight, which could be closed off in the blink of an eye.31 Worryingly, the instinctive reaction on detecting a bad smell, it was noted, was to test the air with repeated sniffs. Given the pervasiveness of stench and its apparent corruptive power, the limited ability to exercise control over what is smelled was deeply troubling. Meanwhile, despite Chadwick’s reforms, by the 1850s there was still no London-wide system of sewerage in place and no single water authority for the capital. By 1858, the Thames in central London had become, in Michael Faraday’s words, a “fermenting sewer,” exacerbated by Chadwick’s well-intentioned project to clear the city streets and courtyards of cesspools by redirecting sewage into the river.32 During the “Great Stink” that summer, fear of miasma escalated to a fever pitch. In July, Punch visualized the invisible miasmas emanating from the river as “The ‘Silent Highway’—Man” who demands “your money or your life,” that is, drainage or disease (fig. 10). In a wry comment on parliamentary wrangling over the expense of implementing a major network of sewerage mains, Death is depicted rowing along the Thames, claiming the lives of those reluctant to commit to the costs of sanitary reform. At the newly built Houses of Parliament, the windows were draped with sheets soaked in chloride of lime to keep the smell at bay; when this failed, the House recessed early.33 The concern was that this “stinking vapour,” described in a report by the medical officer of health as “in the highest degree offensive,” would bring cholera in its wake.34 Memories of the devastating 1853–54 cholera outbreaks were fresh in the public consciousness: 11,000 Londoners had died of the disease that year. Moreover, in 1858, many people still mourned loved ones lost during the epidemic of 1848–49, in which England and Wales suffered 53,000 deaths, or were themselves survivors of the epidemic of 1831–33, when 6,536 died in London alone.35 The very word “cholera” terrorized, conjuring up the prospect of a sudden and horrific death. Stench, Vice, and Pre-Raphaelitism This climate of fear and disgust around stench and filth likely accounts for why most midcentury artists avoided its direct representation. At a time when Academy teaching equated high art with ideal beauty, foul odor, with its associations of disease, poverty, and crime, was the antithesis. Yet Pre-Raphaelitism, with its unflinching realism, scrutiny of working-class physiognomy, and controversial illumination of contemporary social and moral issues (including emigration, prostitution, and gendered double standards around sexual conduct), brought stench

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Fig. 10  John Leech, “The ‘Silent Highway’—Man. ‘Your money or your life,’” cartoon in Punch 30 (July 10, 1858). Photo © Museum of London.

and urban morality into the hallowed realms of high art. Two works in particular, Rossetti’s unfinished painting Found (designed 1853, begun 1859, unfinished; see fig. 11) and Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (1859; see fig. 12) are usefully interpreted in the context of contemporary thinking about stench and miasma.36 In the 1950s, stench plagued Rossetti, living and working as he did at 14 Chatham Place, which overlooked Blackfriars Bridge, one of the most polluted stretches of the Thames.37 On August 14, 1854, he wrote to his aunt, “Hot. . . insufferable these two days—very favorable, I fear, to the spread of cholera. Yesterday the smell from the River was so bad that I was obliged to go out.”38 At other times, it was necessary to leave Chatham Place altogether. In 1858, he escaped the worst of the “river stink” by staying at Morris’s home in Red Lion Square, and in 1860, on marrying Siddall, he took temporary lodgings in Hampstead while searching (unsuccessfully) for a permanent home there, because he feared Chatham Place was exacerbating her ailing health.39 In Found, a flamehaired prostitute with a sickly green pallor drops to her knees against a wall, yards from a Thames bridge at dawn (fig. 11).40 A drover, bringing a calf to market, recognizes her as his former fiancée, but she rejects his help, saying in the words of the poem that accompanied the painting, “Leave me—I do not know you—go away!” Here, industrial pollution is conveyed by the violet-blue blur

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Fig. 11  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Found, designed 1853, begun 1859, unfinished. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 88.9 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

of the Thames, with its wharfs and warehouses, and by dirty brown and yellow smudges of factory smoke. Meanwhile, the destitute woman’s proximity links her to the putrid-smelling river.41 Like the fallen woman in Watts’s suicide painting Found Drowned (1848–50), her corpse might yet be added to the river’s miasmic cargo of rotting detritus.42 In a pen-and-ink study for the work, begun by Rossetti around September 1853, death looms in the form of a tombstone, visible over the graveyard wall, connecting her with the miasma thought to arise from London’s overcrowded cemeteries.

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With Rossetti suffering from throat ulcers and with ill health plaguing the Pre-Raphaelite circle, it is unsurprising that he evoked ideas of dirt and infection in his works, or that Stanhope, who had rented a room below Rossetti’s, did so too. In Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (1859), the open window overlooking the river suggests the infiltration of stench into the prostitute’s chamber (fig. 12). Dirty clouds hanging over the water indicate the pollution generated by the paper mills, tanneries, dye-works, and breweries as well as the steamships that operated on the Thames. Traces of smut smear the windowpane, creating a visual pun on the woman’s besmirched moral character. Her long, loose red hair, the coral necklace (symbolic of Medusa and more broadly of femmes fatales), and the fact that she appears to be wearing a nightdress under a man’s dressing gown during the daytime identify her as “a fallen woman”.43 More damning still are the coins on the dressing table and the walking cane on the floor. Given the prevalence of commentary on both prostitution and miasma in the months following the Great Stink, viewers would have been well-equipped to recognize the female figure as being as tainted as (as well as tainted by) the Thames air she breathes.44 Like the prostitute in Rossetti’s Found, her fall, we deduce, has resulted from her move from country to city life. Here the violets and primroses littering the floor suggest a more innocent upbringing in the countryside, with their scent triggering the suggestion of nostalgia, remorse, and an “awakening conscience”—though her qualms may yet be quashed and the flowers trampled underfoot. Here, the juxtaposition of river stench and fragrant flowers evokes the “fallen angel” dichotomy of pure/impure smell to reinforce the idea of the “fallen woman.” An article in Punch magazine the previous summer supports my contention that looking at Thoughts of the Past (with its glimpse of the industrial Thames) would have brought to mind the “Great Stink.” According to a fictitious announcement, the popular marine painter Edward William Cooke had been commissioned by the government to paint a companion piece to the recent “pleasant little sea-whiff,” A Sniff of the Briny—Day after a Gale, on display at the Royal Academy. A Sniff of the Slimy would depict the Thames at low tide between Lambeth and St Stephen’s, Westminster, “where the Thames is seen and smelt to the greatest advantage.” The background would include “bone-boiling and grease-mills,” the middle distance some “half-submerged putrescent canine carcasses,” while the foreground or “forefilth” would include a sketch of a recent government steamboat expedition, sent out to ascertain the extent of the Thames pollution, with actual portraits of the appointed members of this “Thames Sniffing Committee.” The MPs on board would be painted as “they actually appeared, with their right thumbs and forefingers closely clasped upon their noses.” Poking fun at Ruskin’s exhortations of “truth to nature,” Punch suggested that, in order to paint the river faithfully, the artist had considered using watercolors prepared from river water. However, chemical analysis had ascertained that “what is called in compliment the ‘water’ of the Thames, is in reality, a semi-liquid kind of mud; an

Fig. 12  Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, 1859. Oil on canvas, 86.4 × 50.8 cm. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

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artificial compound of pestiferous ingredients, in which the aqueous particles can only be distinguished by inspection through a microscope.” Painting en plein air would be “perilous” work and Punch, no doubt amused by the apparent exertions of Pre-Raphaelite artists toiling in all weathers to achieve painstaking verisimilitude, was pleased to learn that Cooke was building up his endurance with a pail of Thames water brought within “nose-shot” of his studio every morning. He was, Punch reported, now able to “inhale no less than four distinct sewer-sniffs per hour” without collapsing. 45 Pre-Raphaelitism and the Aesthetics of Cleanliness As literary historian Eileen Cleere has argued, Victorian aesthetic standards shifted under the sanitary idea.46 While the cultural nuances of stench permeated Rossetti’s Found and Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past, Chadwick’s stipulation for sunshine, fresh air, and cleanliness prompted an artistic imperative for lighter, brighter en plein air canvases that informed early Pre-Raphaelitism and gained momentum over the course of the century. Published in 1842, the same year as Chadwick’s sanitary report, Ruskin’s Modern Painters employed the discourse of sanitary reform in its celebration of the bright “clean” colors of J. M. W. Turner, in contrast to what he saw as the murky shadows and “pestilential tones” of the Old Masters.47 Recognized at last as nothing more than common dirt, the long-revered hazy brown patina of Renaissance paintings lost its sublime status with the advent of picture-cleaning campaigns. In the stately homes of England, canvases tarnished from centuries of hanging over sooty fireplaces in cigar-filled drawing rooms faced a scrubbing with soap and water from household staff. At the National Gallery, London, altarpieces besmirched by centuries of candle smoke underwent vigorous conservation treatment alongside canvases feared to have been “injured” by the greasy, stinking fogs that crept in through gallery doors and windows as well by what Gallery Keeper John Seguier described as the “effluvia” of the great unwashed—the sweating, steaming hoi polloi of gallery visitors.48 For the Pre-Raphaelites studying at the adjacent Royal Academy School, newly cleaned paintings were a revelation, as was the “luminous” Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, which had entered the national collection in outstanding condition in 1842.49 Inspired by the vibrant colors they now saw, they adopted a freshness of palette—a new, sanitary approach to art—found in the brightness of Millais’s The Blind Girl (1854–56; see fig. 42). Soap, Scent, and Sunlight Despite Chadwick’s mixed success, there can be no doubt that great strides in sanitation were made during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Britain, the Public Health and Sanitary Acts of 1848, 1866, 1872, and 1875 brought

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piecemeal improvements to drainage, sewerage, street paving, water supply, rubbish collection, and domestic overcrowding. Following Benjamin Disraeli’s Thames Purification Bill of August 1858, Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, led a gargantuan project to transform the sewerage of London, with eighty-two miles of tunnels and ornate pumping stations shifting filth upstream, away from the capital. As networks of modernized sewers and drains spread across Europe, the stench of sewage within cities abated. The problem of overcrowded burial grounds also diminished as new landscaped cemeteries were built on the outskirts of towns and cities. Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, was the world’s largest necropolis when it was established in 1854. Twenty-five miles by rail from London, it served the capital at a convenient distance. With these issues largely addressed, focus turned to industrial odors, which gradually became subject to tighter government controls.50 In England, personal cleanliness was increasingly perceived as a national virtue, and a cross-class “worship of soap and water” emerged.51 Personal hygiene improved as the private bathroom with showers and hot-water plumbing became a popular sanctuary within middle-class homes. Public washhouses, spas, swimming baths, and seaside resorts proliferated, and, from the 1860s, middle-class Victorian disciples of Hygeia indulged in the Turkish baths that sprang up across England and America, inspired by the Pump Rooms in the Royal Leamington Spa and Dr. Shepard’s Sanatorium in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Some medical practitioners promoted the prophylactic advantages of hydropathy, electrochemical baths, sitz baths, douches, tubs, and saunas, while others extolled the virtues of bracers—sea-bathing, rainwater, and ice baths.52 Exhaustive advice on modes of ablution was dispensed through a burgeoning philanthropic literature for the working classes and in domestic manuals and etiquette guides targeted at the middle class. The Victorian obsession with cleanliness led to a burgeoning market of scented products, from quinine hair washes to violet tooth rinses—all marketed as purifying agents. Consumption of soap soared after its tax was abolished in 1853, and, by the 1890s, Victorians were consuming 260,000 tons a year.53 Lever Brothers and Pears milled scented toilet soaps to appeal to middle- and working-class pockets, and both these British companies exported to Europe, America, and the British colonies. As Anne McClintock argued in Imperial Leather (1995), soap emerged commercially at a time in which the social order felt itself “threatened by the fetid effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition and anticolonial resistance.”54 Through rituals of whiteness and cleanliness, soap offered the promise of spiritual salvation and regeneration, both to the great “unwashed” and to the imperial body politic and “the British race.” Once items of exceptional luxury, perfumes likewise became increasingly affordable, following improved methods for extracting raw fragrance materials

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in the 1860s and the discovery of synthetic materials in the 1870s, and helped by the continued advance of steam power and better trading routes. French perfume exports rose from thirteen million francs per year in 1853 to seventy-five million francs in 1889. New perfume houses, such as Roger & Gallet (1862), were established, and older houses, such as Houbigant and Guerlain, flourished. By the 1890s, perfume bazaars and boutiques were well established in Paris and London, and, by 1900, the run-of-the-mill wares of less glamorous manufacturers, such as Colgate, Sears, Stearns and Co., Lundborg, and the California Perfume Company (which later became Avon), were ubiquitous thanks to catalogues and door-to-door sales.55 By the late nineteenth century, many soaps and perfumes traded on the idea of fresh air and sunlight as an antidote to the malodorous air of the city. For example, Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap focused its branding on the virtues of sun-dried laundry. A lithograph advertising Colgate’s Violet Water (ca. 1890) elicits the idea of a refreshing, natural scent with the depiction of a bracing wind whipping at a woman’s skirt, clouds scudding across the sky, and seagulls wheeling above the waves. Lundborg’s Heather of the Links perfume evoked the freshness of the Scottish Highlands (see fig. 39), while Gosnell’s Cherry Blossom perfume took to the skies with perfume-bottle-shaped hot air balloons floating over London in 1908.56 Marketing freshness with products such as Guerlain’s Après l’Ondée (1906) went some way to counterbalance the old association of perfumes with miasma and the sense that perfumes masked rather than cleansed. The rise in cleanliness infiltrated art in several ways. First, as art historian Linda Nochlin has suggested, the late nineteenth century was “bath time,” with bathing imagery and scenes of women at their toilette ubiquitous in both high art and commercial ephemera.57 Second, the rise in perfumery inspired paintings across movements. Examples include La Parfumerie Violet, Boulevard des Capucines (1880) by the Italian Impressionist Giuseppe de Nittis; Profumo (1910) by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (see fig. 29); The Three Perfumes (1912) by the Scottish Symbolist Margaret Macdonald (see fig. 24); and The New Perfume (1914) by the English Classical Academic painter Godward (see fig. 59). Third, as suggested, it coincided with the nineteenth-century trend for plein air painting, from the early paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites to the breezy aesthetic of international Impressionism. The Great Dream of Disinfection Nevertheless, in the urban centers of Europe around 1900, what Corbin has described as “the great dream of disinfection” remained to a large degree just that.58 Indeed, the soap industry, with its use of carbolic acid and extraction of animal fats, was a significant polluter. The Portuguese artist Luciano Freire

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Fig. 13 Luciano Freire, Perfume dos campos, 1899. Oil on canvas, 199 × 160.5 cm. MNAC—Museu do Chiado. Photo: Carlos Monteiro, Direção-Geral do Património Cultural / Arquivo e Documentação Fotográfica.

acknowledged the problem of factory emissions in a painting exhibited at the Paris World Fair in 1900. Perfume dos campos (Perfume of the Fields, 1899; fig. 13) harks back to earlier paintings of the industrial sublime, such as William Wyld’s view of Manchester from Kersal Moor (1852), which documented the brutal but breathtaking encroachment of the city into the countryside. While Wyld’s painting celebrates wealth and power spawned by factories glimmering on the horizon through a smoky haze, in Freire’s painting the countryside has become a factory inferno. A goddess of nature is shown poised on a verdant hill, hair streaming in the wind, as wreaths of lily scent coil around her legs, fusing with her swirling gauzy drape. Only from her high vantage can she escape the fumes belching from the smokestacks below. Far from being deodorized, the atmosphere of European and American cities remained choked with coal dust and stinking sulfur well into the 1900s. The term “smog” was coined in 1893 when the coal-fired economy was at its peak in Britain, and the problem only subsided with the Clean Air Act of 1956.59 Many nineteenth-century slums were not cleared until the 1930s. While Bazalgette’s

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Fig. 14 Edward Linley Sambourne, “London Smells (Edgar Allan Poe ‘Up to Date’),” cartoon in Punch, November 1, 1890. Photo: Punch Cartoon Library / Topfoto.

much-vaunted London sewer system (built between 1859 and 1875) alleviated the stench of the Thames within central London, by the end of the century, the city, with its tens of thousands of domestic coal fires, was deserving of its nickname, The Smoke.60 A poem in Punch in 1890 declared that “fetid sewer smells,” “brick-field smells,” and “bone-boiling smells” created a “cohort of bad smells,” that formed a stench hovering over the city like the “fumes of brass in pickle or of naphtha all alight.” With typical punning humor, Punch attributed the poem to Edgar Allan Poe. In the accompanying cartoon by Edward Linley Sambourne, a top-hatted gentleman staggers through an urban wasteland, his handkerchief clasped to his nose as he flees a phantom smoke cloud (fig. 14). As Punch proclaimed, “London Smells, Smells, Smells, Smells.”61 Removing the Metaphorical Handkerchief Calls for the artistic enjoyment of scent became increasingly clamorous as the nineteenth century progressed, as we have seen. Rindisbacher points to urban

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sanitation to account for this rise in aesthetic interest in smell. His argument: after decades of public health campaigns and public health acts across Europe, the problem of air and water pollution in the stinking, sewage-choked cities abated, and stench was no longer a cause of cultural anxiety. The time had come, he suggests, to remove the metaphorical handkerchief pressed to the public nose and to set the sense of smell free to pursue artistic goals.62 Yet how can urban deodorization fully account for the rise of interest in olfactory aesthetics, given that, despite decades of sanitation efforts, European cities still stank at the turn of the century?63 The idea of scent having an enhanced aesthetic status in a deodorized environment was first circulated in the nineteenth century. In 1869, the American transcendentalist Cranch observed that only if we “sweep our streets and clean our gutters and make sweet our houses . . . will the ground be prepared for that higher and more artistic attention to the thousand perfumes that now ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air.’”64 His words echo Ruskin, who declared that “noble art could only be produced in clean houses and countries.”65 They also hint at The Arabian Nights, translated editions of which were published in 1840 and 1859. One need only imagine the oozing potholes of a Glaswegian wynd and contrast this with a desert scene, with a carcass picked bare, bones bleached by the sun, to understand why Victorian writers often imagined the desert as sterile, empty, and deodorized, permeated only by the sweet scent of exotic flowers and perfumes. Like a blank canvas, primed white and ready to be transformed into a masterpiece, olfactory neutrality was a cultural requisite for the cultivation of any art form deploying or concerning perfume. In 1892, thirty-four years after the “Great Stink,” the perfume manufacturer Charles Henry Piesse suggested that this feat of deodorization was now accomplished. In an age of atmospheric refinement, the nose could be liberated from its role as sentinel and henceforth be designated for luxurious and aesthetic pursuits: “Smell, necessary to the animal for finding its prey and avoiding danger, has become, under normal conditions, an almost useless sense to man, since the refinements of civilizations tend to prevent the production of miasms and the pestilential odors from which he has to protect himself. It is therefore becoming more and more a sense of luxury for civilized man; and that, perhaps, is the reason why poets, from the author of Song of Songs down, have associated all kinds of beauty and joy with perfumes.”66 In this version of human progress, the trajectories of civilization, sanitation, and perfume history are interwoven. Miasma theory (long outmoded by 1892) here lingers on, since it permits a tale of good perfume versus evil stench, with perfume winning the day. Yet does this trade narrative of the historical role of smell as a civilizing force represent a fair account of the rise in the aesthetic interest in smell? Unsurprisingly, it was more complex than this.

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Lingering Miasma While deodorization may be a factor in the rise in interest in olfactory aesthetics, the demise of miasma theory and the gradual acceptance of germ theory are surely more significant. By the late nineteenth century, the emotive force of Chadwick’s claim that “all smell is disease” had waned. In 1854, having recognized that victims in Soho, London, drew their water from the Broad Street pump, John Snow proved that cholera was a waterborne disease. Following the construction of Bazalgette’s sewers, the last cholera epidemic in the city occurred in 1866. Ten years later, Robert Koch discovered that Bacillus anthracis was the cause of anthrax and in 1884 he went on to identify the bacterium that causes cholera. In doing so, Koch proved that “germs” spread disease.67 When the stench in Paris reached appalling levels in the summer of 1880, the sanitary expert Paul Brouardel was able to state that “everything that stinks does not kill, and everything that kills does not stink.”68 Arguably, as germ theory filtered into the public consciousness, miasma’s grip of terror weakened, leaving artists and writers less haunted by the fear of contagious stench and free to muse upon the beauty and pleasurable qualities of perfume. Nevertheless, the tenacity of long-established anxieties about the sense of smell as a harbinger of physical and moral corruption should not be underestimated. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of artists, including Rossetti, Walter Crane, and Waterhouse addressed the theme of Pandora, with Rossetti returning to it several times between 1869 and 1878, producing drawings and pastels as well as a dark, haunting oil painting. In these works, the evils of the world take on the visual form of a fume, adopted from the visual vernacular for smell and miasma. In Rossetti’s chalk drawing Pandora (1878), fumes billow from the casket, forming a perverse halo around the girl’s head (fig. 15). Writing about it, Swinburne described “winged and fleshless passions” swirling in the “smoke and fiery vapour.” Arguably, these winged heads evoke not only a miasma of “ill-born things” but also microbes borne through the air on the fumes of incense.69 They are the “fallen angels” of stench rather than the fragrant “winged ministers between sense and soul” described by Cranch in “A Plea for the Sense of Smell.”70 The idea of odors as airborne carriers for germs persisted for several decades after the discovery of “germ theory” proved that cholera was a waterborne disease. For a short time, sanitarians even referred to microbes as the “microbian miasma.”71 While germ theory proved that microbes rather than miasmas cause disease, odors continued to be perceived as accurate markers of the preconditions for sickness because they indicated the presence of dirt and decay.72 The longevity of the miasma theory relates to its invitation to expel dirt and sweep away slums as a simple, visible expedient for combating disease. Like Lundborg’s

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Fig. 15  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Pandora, 1878. Pastel on paper, 100.8 × 66.7 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool. Photo: Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool / Bridgeman Images.

Heather of the Links (see fig. 39), Colgate’s Violet Water, and Gosnell’s Cherry Blossom perfumes, Lever Brothers’ ubiquitous Sunlight Soap referenced older sanitary beliefs about using sunshine and fresh air to expose and expel dirt from nooks and crannies—yet the product also claimed to be antibacterial. As both art and advertising reveals, old and new knowledge intertwined in the popular imagination—a reminder that we cannot assume a precise mirroring of the latest scientific understandings within the public consciousness.73 As late as 1905, the explorer and plant collector Frederick Burbidge observed: “I believe all pleasant odours are harmless, and very often they are actually beneficial. On the other hand, whilst many disagreeable odours may be harmless, but few of them do us any good, and some of them carry the germs of dire disease, and often prove a scourge to the human race.”74 Fanciful as this observation seems, he surely intended this as a revision to Chadwick’s famous claim that “all smell is disease,” and as a demonstration of how scientific thinking had progressed over the previous sixty years. Despite its suggestion of progress, a trace of miasma

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theory lingers on in this statement, its hold upon the public imagination still not entirely dissipated. The Thrill of Miasma Far from all smells being dangerous, in the 1890s good smells were extolled as being therapeutic and having the power to combat disease. In a poster for the incense papers of Papier d’Arménie (ca. 1890) by the little-known female artist Léona Marcelle Beaussart, a haloed girl is seated on steps overlooking the Islamic façade of a mosque (fig. 16). She burns strips of Papier d’Arménie, a blotting paper infused with the exotic scent of Armenian benzoin resin, the stringent soapy fumes of which drive away a host of demons, including the hovering form of winged Death with his scythe.75 Darkness is falling, and a bat hovers over the tombstones of the graveyard, suggesting that the ghoulish forms represent not only malevolent forces but also the miasma rising from corpses, rotting, we assume, in their shallow, overcrowded graves. Yet the girl seems unperturbed. The sanitizing act of burning Papier d’Arménie is presented as an exorcism of both unclean spirits and sanitary defects. The disinfectant has the power to expel disease and to purge the human spirit—just as, in many world religions, incense holds a prophylactic role, quite aside from its symbolic references to the transcendence of prayer and its creation of religious ambience.76 As in paintings of Pandora, the miasmic fumes represent the evils of the world, but here it is a battle of scent versus stench, good versus evil, with the good scents victorious. The text “parfum assainit,” superimposed over the image of the fumes, is a play on words suggesting the moral value or “saintliness” of the product as an agent for securing, as Stamelman suggests, “the health of the body and therefore the purity of the soul.”77 Though printed half a decade after the great cholera epidemics that blighted Europe’s cities in the 1840s and 1850s, Beaussart’s poster for Papier d’Arménie bears the legacy of the horror engendered in the sanitation reports and newspaper articles of that period. The poster references the satirical cartoons of Miasma Demons and the embodiment of Death published during the summer of the “Great Stink.” It also brings to mind an image described in 1843 by William Farr, England’s Registrar General and the leading demographer of London, of a “disease-mist, arising from the breath of two millions of people [sic], from open sewers and cesspools, graves and slaughterhouses,” which “like an angel of death” had “hovered for centuries over London” but which might yet “be driven away by legislation.”78 While Farr lobbied for sanitary reform, here the scent of the resin expels the physical and social corruption of the city. The thrilling fear of miasma was also sensationalized in the horror literature of the 1890s. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the stench of dried blood betrays the heinous presence of the Count. When Jonathan Harker infiltrates

Fig. 16  Léona Marcelle Beaussart, Papiers d’Arménie, ca. 1890. Lithograph, 136 × 98 cm. Photo © Coll. Musée International de la Parfumerie, Grasse, France.

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the vampire’s lair, he is sickened by the overpowering “earthy smell, as of some dry miasma”; he has the awful impression that the breath of the monster has “clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness” and that “corruption had become itself corrupt.” To Harker it seems that the “stagnant and foul air” of Dracula’s den is “composed of all the ills of mortality,” a phrase reminiscent of the conceit of the opening of Pandora’s box.79 As with Beaussart’s poster, Stoker’s novel refers back to mid-Victorian sanitary imagery in which vampires symbolize the invasion of contaminated air into the body and the rendering of flesh as an agent of contagion. In the novel, Doctor Seward is powerless to save Lucy Westenra, but science prevails and, in contrast to the vampire in the Punch poem of 1847, Dracula is vanquished. Though miasma theory had long been discredited by the 1890s, the fear of smell and the horrors of cholera were vividly remembered; indeed, the disease continued to ravage parts of Europe, India, and the colonies.80 Yet, by this time, the threat at last seemed surmountable. With increasing numbers of Europeans accustomed to clean drinking water and robust sewerage systems, there was a growing sense of detachment from the horrors of cholera. In such a climate, fear of miasma was both real enough, and distant enough, to make for thrilling art and fiction. Perfuming the Femme Fatale As odor shrugged off the worst taboos of disease, artists seemingly became increasingly fascinated with the complexities of perfume as foul and fragrant, pleasurable and perverse. While the ideas and anxieties surrounding smell continued to furnish critics with their essential arsenal for attack, for many artists and writers the abject qualities of perfume became intertwined with ideas around the demarcation of the “Other,” since, as Corbin has argued, “collective hyperesthesia” was heightening alertness to and intolerance of the smells of others.81 Made with animal fats and often fixed with musk (a honey-like secretion produced in an abdominal gland of the male musk deer) or with civet (a strong-smelling buttery excretion scraped from the perineal glands of civet cats) and worn to mask or enhance body odors, perfume was at once pleasurable and repulsive. As Classen argues in “Odor of the Other,” “seductresses are associated with heavily sweet and spicy odors; the sweetness of the scent signifying their beauty and attraction, and the spiciness and heaviness, their exotic status and overwhelming powers of fascination.”82 The depiction of perfumes, potions, and aromatic herbs lends a dangerous, exotic quality to paintings of femmes fatales and witches, such as Frederick Sandys’s Medea (1866–68) and Morgan Le Fay (1863–64) or Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886). In Rossetti’s “stunners” of the 1860s and 1870s, the positioning of the figures close to the picture plane creates a sense of airlessness, as in Lady Lilith (1866– 68, 1872–73), in which the perfume bottles and dense roses evoke the idea of a

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Fig. 17  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864–68. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 68 cm. Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK. Photo: Supported by the National Art Collections Fund / Bridgeman Images.

heavily sweet and suffocating scent, signifying her beauty and attraction.83 In Venus Verticordia (1864–68), a bare-breasted Venus with luscious red lips and cascades of auburn hair is embowered in a profusion of full-blown roses and honeysuckle, the sheer density and opulence of which brings to mind a strong floral scent (fig. 17). Set off against green foliage, the fleshy pink and red petals of the roses have a warm intensity. The Venetian-inspired tones create a feeling of visual excess, and the surfeit of beauty seems to spill over into other senses, as if threatening to engulf the viewer in a cloying fragrance. However, fluttering above Venus is a bluebird, a reference to ancient classical lore (which asserted that the bird had a life span of a single day) and a reminder that life and love, like the ephemeral roses and their scent, are fleeting. Yet, despite the classical references, this goddess of love with her apple (trophy of the beauty contest judged by Paris) is an Eve-like temptress. Indeed, the art critic F. G. Stephens, a friend of Rossetti’s, described how this “winner of hearts . . . reeks not for her soul; fraught with peril, her ways are inscrutable; there is more evil than good in her.”84 The curling tongues of the honeysuckle, like fragrance trails, lure—even suck in—the viewer, like an insect, and are, as feminist art historian Griselda Pollock noted,

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Fig. 18  Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876. Oil on canvas, 143.5 × 104.3 cm. The Armand Hammer Collection. Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

evocative of female genitalia.85 Yet, as Swinburne and the artist’s brother William Michael Rossetti observed in their Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868, the butterflies alight not upon the honeysuckle, or what Rossetti described as those “virgin lamps of scent & dew,” but are drawn instead to Venus’s halo, apple, and spear.86 Her own scent, we might imagine, is more intense and seductive even than the flowers that envelop her and far more potent than the light, simple, floral toilet waters that etiquette favored for English ladies in the 1860s. In the art of Rossetti, the subversive qualities of perfume were embodied in images of the beautiful but corrosive femme fatale. The perfumed temptress is also the theme of Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876; fig. 18), a French Symbolist painting described by Classen as evoking “textures, scents and music within a subtle tapestry of colors washed in glowing highlights and smoky shadows.”87 In the painting, which electrified critics at the 1876 Salon, Salome dances before Herod, gliding forward on tiptoe from left to right. With eyes closed, as if in trance, she breathes in the scents of the lotus flower in her

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hand, the roses strewn on the floor, and the incense swirling from a burner. In Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), Des Esseintes is the custodian of the painting, and we learn of his response to the work through the voice of the narrator. As he studies the painting, Des Esseintes imagines the “ageing Herod” watching Salome’s “lubricious dance” until he is “overwhelmed, overmastered, dizzied before this figure of the dancing girl.” Describing the tetrarch as “driven wild” by this woman’s nakedness, which has been soaked in musky scents, drenched in sweet-smelling balms, and steeped in the fumes of incense and myrrh, the narrator evokes a heady mix of incense and perfume, which form the accoutrements of deadly seduction. The intensity of the scent evokes the musky exotic perfumes of the Second Empire, in contrast to the lighter floral scents dictated by 1870s French decorum.88 In the painting, there is another, more subtle, suggestion of scent that is absent from Huysmans’s novel. Lounging among the overblown roses in the shadows of Herod’s throne is a panther, an ancient symbol of the arts of venery, magic, and amorous seduction, and of the beautiful courtesan.89 In ancient Greek myth, the “perfumed panther” was the only beast to have a pleasing smell: a breath so aromatic that, according to Aristotle, “wild beasts smell it with delight.” The panther would wait in the shadows, enticing animals, before springing and seizing its prey.90 In Moreau’s painting, the alluring breath of the exotic panther parallels Salome’s bewitching aura, and the presence of the beast foretells the beheading of St. John the Baptist.91 In France, perfume became a metaphor for perceptions of “the Orient” as sublime and erotic yet socially decayed. Just as the ornate architecture and marble and gold trappings of Herod’s palace mask corruption, so the suggestion of perfume, with its floral finery over a dark fecal mulch, hints at depravity. Des Esseintes’s response to Moreau’s Orient is poised between desire and repulsion, prompting him to imagine that the painting exudes a “perverse” odor.92 The Beauty of Smog By the end of the century, even the beauty of stench could be contemplated. In contrast to the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, who, in December 1856, wrote in a letter to the poet William Allingham, “I will not defile my page by describing the dirty yellow fog,” Monet, in his paintings of the Thames at the Palace of Westminster, Charing Cross, and Waterloo (1898–1903), infused his canvases with purple arabesques and dirty pink, ochre, and gray scrawls to convey the beauty of the light filtering through the swirling smog.93 Though smog, smoke, and smell are not synonymous, smog and smoke both endow invisible smell with a visual presence, and, given the association between air pollution and odor, Monet’s paintings of the Thames likely triggered thoughts of smog’s sulfuric odor and the smells of London’s riverside industries.

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Smog was often presented as a depressive influence. In George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), a “thick black fog” that could be “smelt and tasted” penetrates the house and “poisons the soul,” exacerbating Marian’s misery, while in Eugène Carrière’s gray-brown monochromatic Symbolist paintings, a foggy gloom creates a doleful sense of ennui.94 Yet Monet rejoiced in painting the enveloping smog. Far from being concerned by the noxious air, in 1901 he wrote to his wife of waking one morning and being “terrified to see that there was no fog” and of his relief, for the sake of his unfinished canvases, when “little by little the fires were lit, and the smoke returned.”95 In an interview with a journalist, he said, “I love the fog . . . it is the fog that gives it [the Palace of Westminster] its magnificent amplitude; its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.”96 Madame Merle, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), expressed a similar sentiment, declaring that in England “the pleasures of smell were great—that in this inimitable Island there was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the nostril.”97 In his account of “the Great Stinks of London and Paris” of 1858 and 1880, respectively, David S. Barnes wonders, “is it even possible that the sensory and emotional valences of foul odors varied within a single city and with the span of a century or so?”98 As we have seen, responses to smell changed a great deal over the course of the nineteenth century due to the rise in sanitation, advances in the perfume industry, and the decline in miasma theory. These changes contributed to a heightened, if complex, appreciation of perfume and its relationship with art. In short, stench’s reign of terror seems to have largely curtailed smell’s role in the artistic imagination of the 1840s and 1850s, with the rebellious Rossetti and Stanhope indecorously depicting stench as an act of defiance against the expectations of the Academy. However, artistic visions of scent proliferated from the 1870s onward in tandem with the gradual subsidence of miasma’s hold upon the cultural imagination. As germ theory filtered into the public consciousness, artists were seemingly liberated to pursue depictions of smell and smelling, while the suggestion of heavy perfume remained deeply perturbing—perfect for conjuring deadly seductresses, femme fatales, and racialized constructions of “mysterious” women of the Orient. Moreover, while the fear-driven quest of the midcentury to see and control miasma had subsided, a fascination with seeing or visualizing smell lingered on.

Chapter 3

Picturing Perfume

Precisely because so much smell is elusive, it evades representation in words or pictures: in this sense it conveys something in the air, something understood and experienced yet intangible and invisible even when pervasive. —Clare Brant, Journal of British Studies, 2004

In John Singer Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), odor is reinterpreted as sight (fig. 19). The painting, begun during a trip to the Moroccan town of Tétouan during the winter of 1879–80 and finished in the painter’s Paris studio, depicts an Eastern woman infusing her robes and her senses with the musky scent of ambergris. Dressed in white, she has created a hood with her robes, which she holds over her head to catch the scented smoke ascending from an incense burner. Her downward gaze directs the viewer’s attention to the spurts of smoky paint that issue from the censer, drifting skyward as if (we might imagine) summoned by her gaze. Mesmerized, our eyes linger over the coiling, escalating twists of pure perfume, rendered in translucent wisps of vapory, violet paint, before being lured upward by the gleaming fabric of the figure’s upper garment. Then, as the eye sweeps across the canvas, it is again attracted to the smoky violet fumes, the hue of which is iterated in the swirls of shadows around the figure’s sleeves and ruff. Drawn to this rising trail of color, the eye traces the entire length of the woman’s left contour. This pattern of viewing echoes and reinforces the trajectory of the scent, bringing to mind the part-seen, part-visualized ascension of the perfumed air from its source in the burner to its inhalation at the nose. Fumée d’ambre gris creates a sense of ambiguity over what the eye sees and the mind fabricates. Through the radiance of the glistening sunshine, it is as if we can see the molecules of fragrance vibrate and tremble, revealing the artist’s debt

Fig. 19  John Singer Sargent, Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), 1880. Oil on canvas, unframed dimensions 139.1 × 90.6 cm. Acquired by Sterling Clark, 1914. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.15. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

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Fig. 20  Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne, 1908–9. Oil on canvas, 124 × 109 cm. Photo: Musée d’Art Moderne, Brussels, Belgium / Bridgeman Images.

to, and reworking of, Impressionist atmospherics. Though an oil painting, it has the appearance of a watercolor, so thinly are the paints applied.1 This technique captures the delicate subtleties and ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere, with the colors diffused in such an ethereal manner as to reveal the smoke’s spreading yet evanescent form(lessness). The scent seemingly diffuses as it rises, mingling first with the mottled light of the lower robe, which is dappled with tinges of bluish smoke, before dancing in the dazzling, pearl luster of the central cloth. It dissolves in the diaphanous sheen and melts in the resplendent yellow,

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giving the illusion of soaking into the drapery itself and drenching the figure in sunlight and perfume. Flickering against the lucid Eastern light, the vapor seems to be shifting, evanescent, and intangible. Now you see it, now you don’t. In Sargent’s painting, ambergris particles seem almost visible, like motes of dust dancing in a sunbeam. In this respect, it might be compared to a painting made three decades later: Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne of 1908–9, in which the artist’s lover, Marthe de Méligny, is depicted holding an open bottle of perfume, of which the fragrant vapors and molecules seem visible, caught in rays of light (fig. 20). In his cultural history of fragrance, Perfume, Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin (2006), Stamelman describes the visual representation of perfume in the painting as “seen but not smelled, perfume becomes visual; it is expressed and represented through the medium of light.” Likening perfume to wind, “whose reality is perceived through the effects it leaves in its wake—bending tree limbs, blowing snow, scudding clouds,” Stamelman adds that “perfume, in order to be seen, must first undergo a transformation, a change of state; it must become shimmering, liquid light.”2 Both Sargent’s and Bonnard’s paintings are suggestive of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century desire to understand smell and the nature and impact of its communion with the body and mind. Beyond the reach of normal vision, smell was mysterious, intangible, and ephemeral. Part of its appeal was its “irreducibility to image and concept,” which, as literary scholar Connor observes, “makes odour and the idea of odour so powerful.”3 Yet the belief in vision’s supremacy for the acquisition of knowledge was so powerful that, from the 1850s, there was a strong impulse to try to see or visualize smell in order to understand it, and this in turn inspired artists to explore the myriad ways of giving visual presence to invisible smell. The Fairy Under the Microscope Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris and Bonnard’s Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne both invite us to imagine scent molecules shimmering in the light. From the 1870s, molecular scientists made great strides identifying, isolating, and illuminating molecular odor compounds under the microscope and reproducing them synthetically for use in artificial perfumes. By 1879, when Sargent began work on his painting, the corpuscular theory was well established scientifically and was filtering into the public consciousness. This theory held that odor occurs when particles disengage from the surface of matter, dissolve into air or liquid, and act upon the surface of the olfactory nerves. In 1862, the German cell scientist Max Schultze localized the olfactory membrane high up in the nasal cavity and identified the membrane’s cilia (long, hair-like cells) as the olfactory receptors.4 He argued that as scent vapors dissolve into the moist mucous membrane, the scent molecules change in state from gas to liquid. This sets the cilia vibrating,

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activating the transmission of neural impulses to the cerebral olfactory center, where odor recognition transpires. In the 1870s, the French physiologist Théodore Liégois observed odoriferous substances such as camphor and succinic acid under the microscope and was able to scrutinize the molecules. He noticed that different smell particles moved differently in terms of speed and pattern, separating and diffusing from the water at different rates. He suggested that these particles might move upon the moist surface of the olfactory membrane in the same manner and thus irritate the nerve endings.5 The nature of the smell was thought to result from the rate and pattern of the jiggling scent particles.6 This sense of oscillating molecules resonates in Sargent’s and Bonnard’s paintings. During the Victorian period, new high-powered microscopes extended the reach of vision and knowledge. The infinitesimal was embraced as the microscope brought myriad hitherto unseen entities into the visual terrain, and the kingdom of life was suddenly boundless, as microcosms revealed their secrets—whether in the science laboratory or the home study.7 In the 1850s and 1860s, natural theologists advocated what Amy King has called “a methodology of minuteness.”8 This was popularized in works such as Philip Henry Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope (1859) as well as in texts by women scientists, such as Sketches with the Microscope (1858, reprinted eight times by 1880) by the Anglo-Irish naturalist and artist Mary Ward and Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869) by Oxford’s “Queen of Science,” Mary Somerville.9 Yet while Gosse, Ward, and Somerville marveled at the flawless precision of God’s minute creations, there was a disturbing side to these revelations. The fact that everything was seen to be teeming with microorganisms altered, as historian Joseph Amato has observed, “people’s sense of what inhabited the unseen worlds around and within their own bodies.”10 This led to a heightened sense of fear and fascination with the unseen and the unknown. Odor, with its association with miasma, was one aspect of a growing lexicon of minute and invisible things that, like the comma-shaped cholera bacillus (discovered by Filippo Pacini in 1854 and rediscovered by Koch in 1884), X-rays (1895), radioactivity (1896), and the electron (1897), might lay siege to the unsuspecting body.11 Many of the new fields that emerged in the nineteenth century, such as bacteriology, helminthology (the study of parasitic worms), entomology (the study of insects), and protozoology (the study of single-celled microorganisms) were committed to illuminating and eliminating invisible menaces. The dual scientific and artistic impulse to see smell connects with this wider contemporary concern with gaining an intellectual grasp of, and consequently control over, the invisible. In a letter to the editor of The Times in 1854, a writer calling himself “The Investigator” observed: “I think if the public could be brought to see that which floats in what they smell from sewers and cesspools, they would be more careful . . . to . . . limit the escape of its life-crowded atmosphere.” The author claimed to have conducted an experiment by which he covered the airshaft of a

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cesspool with a glass plate smeared with glycerine. Eight hours later, on removing the plate and looking at it under the microscope, he was able to see decaying organic matter and thousands of maggot-shaped organisms and bodies. These were “shaped like mushrooms, the stalks of which twisted about as the umbrella head revolved.” Smell and miasmata (particles from decomposed matter) were synonymous to “The Investigator,” who continued, “it would not surprise me if particles of scent—say from the fox or civet—could be made apparent to the eye.” Using basic plate culture techniques, the writer believed that it would be possible to “map smells” or apprehend their organic atoms on paper “so as to show their outline.”12 The Investigator’s comments elicited the mirth of Punch. In an article entitled “Fragrance Visible,” the satirical magazine suggested that further investigations would show that “every odour has its shape; and we shall be able to distinguish the perfume of a dead well from that of a pig-sty, by looking at it through a magnifying glass.”13 Fear of stench gradually abated from the 1860s onward, as the miasma theory ceded to the germ theory in the public understanding. Yet the desire to see smell continued to mount. New instruments designed for detecting, measuring, and comparing odors—such as Zwaardemaker’s olfactometer (1888)—resembled a microscope in terms of their visual design. Rather than peering down a lens, users of Eugène Mesnard and Gaston Bonnier’s apparatus of 1896 placed their nose into an orifice set into a covered box that enabled them to focus on the scents inside. Edison too made a clear comparison with visual technologies— his invention for measuring smell was named the “odorscope.”14 Beyond the olfactory sciences, the modes of visualizing smell were many and various and sometimes downright fantastical. Intrigued by spirit photography, the American clairvoyant and seer Andrew Jackson Davis pondered in his book Death and the After-Life (1866) whether it might be possible to photograph other invisible forces, so that “one of these days, Art will catch the fragrance of a flower, so that you can take the likeness of an odor to your friends!”15 Caught in the photographer’s flashlight, the visual beauty of odor would be seen at last, easing anxieties about the unknown, just as apprehending a ghost on a photographic plate could be both thrilling and comforting.16 Davis anticipated a time when “men will say, ‘Is it possible that for centuries we have been only able to smell without seeing, while now we can see what we have known only by the olfactory nerves?’”17 This aspiration to see smell was also expressed by Burbidge in a Royal Horticultural Society lecture of 1898 on fragrant plants, in which he noted his frustration at being unable to accompany his lecture with slides showing the actual scent particles under discussion.18 René Lalique imagined doing just that with his flaçon design for François Coty’s 1909 perfume Cyclamen (fig. 21), which incorporated an intaglio motif of fairies reaching up to smell a flower, their wings cascading down each panel of a tapered six-sided bottle. The transparent glass with the fairies outlined in black

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Fig. 21  René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, designed 1909 for Cyclamen for François Coty, ca. 1909. Press-molded and mold-blown, patinated glass, height: 14 cm. Sir Claude Phillips Bequest, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

enamel created both a cellular effect and the impression of seeing scent, embodied as a fairy, as if on a microscope slide. Whimsical examples, all three, and yet, like Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris and Bonnard’s Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne, they point to a recurring theme in nineteenth-century olfactory discourse about the insufficiency of experiencing odor through the sense of smell alone. The Visual Language of Smell The desire to see smell and the concurrent impulse to depict it in visual form is evident in “scented visions” from circa 1850 to 1914. Invisible odor does not lend itself to visual illustration any more than it does to verbal expression. Yet the impossibility of fully representing smell visually did not deter artists from trying, any more than the inadequate syntax for smell and smelling in Western

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languages deterred poets and writers. Indeed, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, both within and beyond the Academy, deployed a wide arsenal of techniques for suggesting the presence of smell in their works, many of them drawn from Renaissance painting and Dutch allegories of the five senses.19 The sensorial qualities of early Renaissance paintings were an important source of inspiration for nineteenth-century painters. In The Sensory World of Renaissance Art, art historian François Quiviger has described the Italian Renaissance motif of petals scattered profusely or fluttering through the air to create a suggestion of fragrant air.20 The Victorian revival of Renaissance art saw this technique emulated in numerous paintings. In Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), the Roman emperor engulfs his guests in suffocating roses, with a ribbon of cascading petals apparently projecting into our space (see fig. 58). In creating this illusion, Alma-Tadema would seem to acknowledge and surpass the feat of foreshortening in Lorenzo Lotto’s altarpiece Madonna of the Rosary (1539), in which frolicking putti hurl rose petals at the viewers (originally the friars who would have knelt before it at the church of St. Dominic in Cingoli, Italy). Meanwhile, the Post-Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn de Morgan looked to the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli not only for his fresh, vivid style and truth to nature but also for his ability to evoke the intangible: a sea breeze, a scented glade, the hush of night. The poppies strewn by the figure of Sleep in De Morgan’s Night and Sleep (1878) take direct inspiration from the roses tumbling in the sea breeze in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485), as the wind god, Zephyr, and his wife, Chloris, blow Venus to shore. Along with Primavera (ca. 1480), this painting had a profound influence upon De Morgan’s work after she saw and copied it in the Uffizi in the 1870s. Although the poppies are unscented, the fluttering petals in De Morgan’s painting evoke the idea of a soporific perfume. They also allude to the devastation of opium and laudanum addiction that was rife in Victorian Britain.21 Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish allegories of the five senses typically presented a more prosaic, if humorous, approach to depicting the sense of smell, seemingly of more interest to Victorian satirical cartoonists than to Academic painters. Dutch allegories featured images of people sniffing things, recoiling from stench, or performing foul-smelling activities. Examples include Rembrandt’s The Unconscious Patient (ca. 1625), in which a youth faints as a barber-surgeon prepares to let blood from the patient’s arm while a concerned elderly woman revives him with a scented handkerchief, and Jan Molenaer’s Smell (1637), in which a peasant leans back in disgust, holding his nose, while his wife wipes flecks of excrement off their baby’s bottom. The depiction of stench in Victorian satirical cartoons shows a lineage from Dutch art with its emphasis on exaggerated facial expressions and the body language of repulsion to suggest both the presence of a stench and something of the nature of it. See, for example, the dour expression and exaggerated nose pinch in John Leech’s Punch cartoon

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Fig. 22  John Leech, “Faraday Giving His Card to Father Thames,” cartoon in Punch 29 (1855): 27. Photo: The Royal Institution, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

“Faraday Giving His Card to Father Thames” (1855; fig. 22). While gestures of disgust such as grimacing, retching, narrowing the nostrils, or wrinkling and turning up the nose were alien to nineteenth-century high art, closed eyes, flared nostrils, and a dreamy smile were common means of representing pleasure in scent—as, for example, in Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s In springtime, the only pretty ring time—From As You Like It (1901). While the earthier elements of seventeenth-century allegorical paintings, such as vomiting, defecating, or diaper-changing, contravened nineteenth-century ideals of beauty, evocations of smell through the depiction of olfactory activities were inventive and diverse across the range and breadth of nineteenth-century Western art. These included inhaling scent in Burne-Jones’s Woman up a Ladder Smelling a Blossom (ca. 1860); holding flowers in Ford Madox Brown’s The Nosegay (1867); burning incense in Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris (1880; see fig.

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19); consuming steaming potatoes and pouring coffee in Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885); making perfume in Mowbray’s The Rose Harvest (1887; see fig. 67); smoking tobacco in Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players (1892–96); harvesting petals in Henry Herbert La Thangue’s Violets for Perfume (ca. 1913); and applying perfume in Godward’s The New Perfume (1914; see fig. 59), to name but a few. The many nineteenth-century paintings in which women smell roses have their roots in Dutch paintings of the five senses. Compare, for example, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s The Sense of Smell (1617–18) with the fleshy substantiality of the female nude, the density of the blooms, and the presence of slumbering wild beasts signaling a succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh in Watts’s Eve Tempted (1868; fig. 23). Whereas Brueghel’s Venus holds the rose coyly to her nose and lips, Watts’s Eve leans precariously, as if intoxicated by the tempting taste and scent of the fruit and blossoms; she thrusts her face deep into the apple tree in her lust for the forbidden fruit. Watts’s patron, Mrs. Barrington, described the figure of Eve as bending “forward to the fruit which is tempting her, not plucking it, but allowing herself to be allured to its seductive fragrance.” In contrast, Watts’s second wife, Mary, described how “Eve yields to the tempters” of a “lower ecstasy,” “her spiritual nature, lulled to sleep by the opulent beauty around her, the colors and scents of fruits and flowers, and the fawning animal life.”22 For Mary Watts, Eve’s sensory insatiability suggested the corruptive seductiveness of the material world and its opposition to the spiritual life. A later version of Eve Tempted (exhibited 1884) became the central painting of Watts’s Eve Trilogy: an emotive depiction of Eve’s ascension to life, her temptation, and her grief after her downfall. Eve’s features bear some resemblance to Ellen Terry, who, as we have seen, chose stage life over marriage to Watts. In Eve Repentant, Eve is more fleshy and substantial to suggest her sin and burden of guilt, while the depiction of a chestnut tree might reference the semen-like odor that emanates from chestnut flowers as a further indication of her fall.23 Although by the nineteenth century allegories of the five senses were no longer commonplace, artists continued to draw from this visual vocabulary, adopting the traditional lexicon for evoking smell and adapting it to suit their own subjects and styles.24 At the same time, the explosion of artistic activity in Europe from circa 1880 to 1910 among artists working in the Symbolist, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Divisionist, and Futurist styles led to the development of a multitude of new techniques for capturing intrinsic qualities over external appearance. Figurative representations of olfactory objects (such as flowers, perfume bottles, incense burners, and steaming bowls of soup); actions related to smelling (such as leaning in to smell a flower, dabbing perfume on the wrist, or pressing a handkerchief to the nose); and corresponding body language and facial expressions were no longer enough to evoke the synesthetic qualities demanded of art. Rather, artists increasingly combined these signs with new expressive

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Fig. 23  George Frederick Watts, Eve Tempted, 1868. Oil on canvas, 251.5 × 109.2 cm. Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey, UK. Photo © Trustees of Watts Gallery / Bridgeman Images.

codes for rendering smell visually meaningful, such as fairies, fragrance trails, and colored vapors. Embodying Perfumes This shift toward sensorial suggestion through expressive color and form is reflected in The Three Perfumes (1912; fig. 24) by Margaret Macdonald, member of the Glasgow Four and wife and creative partner of the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.25 In this stylized watercolor, perfumes are embodied as waif-like female forms within an ethereal world, not unlike the fairy scent forms of Lalique’s perfume bottles for Coty’s Cyclamen (1909; see fig. 21).

Fig. 24  Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The Three Perfumes, 1912. Watercolor and pencil on vellum, 50.2 × 47.6 cm. Courtesy Collection Cranbrook Art Museum.

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Fig. 25  René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, designed ca. 1908 for L’Effleurt for François Coty, ca. 1912. Bottle and stopper: mold-blown glass with patina, height: 11.4 cm. Photo © Lalique SA 2018. Photographer: Skot Yobbagy.

Clustering around a fragrant white lily, three maidens breathe in the scent of the roses as blue and pink droplets of perfume rain down upon them. Delicate and fragile, this object seems as insubstantial as ephemeral fragrance, its image in soft focus like an ethereal scent-inspired vision, while the softness of vellum, combined with the smudging of the washes, creates a fluidity and vagueness of outline so that the figures appear to diffuse into the vapors of the atmosphere like the perfumes they represent. Here, the evocation of the spirit of perfume contributes to the esoteric mysticism of Macdonald’s work, with its elevation of spiritual transcendence over scientific or material concerns. Her Symbolist vision, linking scent as the soul of a flower to perfect femininity, epitomizes the anti-materialist philosophy of the pioneering Glasgow style, and she evokes this theme time and again in works such as The Heart of the Rose (a gesso panel of 1902) and La Mort Parfumée (1921). The Three Perfumes suggests the idea of exquisite, rarefied perfumes through the richness of the violet, purple, and pink colors together with the delicacy of the background patterning as well as by the

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women’s luxurious, flowing mantles decked with jewels, roses, and lotus blossoms. Yet these sumptuous violet tones also respond to the ubiquity of synthetic violet scents in the years 1900–1914, when, as perfume historian Lizzie Ostrom observes, “you couldn’t move without being assaulted by the scent of violets; anyone who detested it would have found the era trying.”26 Violets were the reigning scent of the Edwardian period, thanks to the discovery of ionones (aroma compounds with the sweet powdery scent of Parma violets) in 1893. Synthetic violets became prevalent in perfumes such as Roger & Gallet’s Vera Violetta (1895), Guerlain’s Après l’Ondée (1906), and Yardley’s April Rain (1913) as well as in scores of run-of-the-mill fragrances, violet face powders, chocolates, and liqueurs.27 This is not a hypocrisy of Macdonald’s work. The discovery of ionone in 1893 and its cheap manufacture were an industry secret, and the public continued to believe in perfume as the natural essence of flowers, while rejoicing in the new directions taken in avant-garde fragrance toward abstract expression.28 The Three Perfumes is one of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images in which spirits (such as fairies, peris, and genii) morph into or out of smell. These range from the miasma demons in Beaussart’s poster for Papier d’Arménie (see fig. 16) and the “ill-born things” in Rossetti’s Pandora (see fig. 15) to the nebulous sylph that materializes out of perfume plumes spiraling from the curved petals of a flower in Lalique’s dazzling molded and pressed-glass perfume vial for Coty’s L’Effleurt of 1908 (fig. 25). Images of smell embodied as fairies relate to the nineteenth-century desire to render smell visible to the naked eye. On the Fragrance Trail During the 1890s and early 1900s, an alternative means of depicting smell emerged in European Symbolist paintings as well as Art Nouveau graphic design—that of the stylized fragrance trail. A rare example in English Symbolist painting is De Morgan’s The Cadence of Autumn (1905), in which a ribbon of smoky and once again violet paint evokes the scent of autumn leaves, as the leaf litter is swept up by and swirls in the breeze.29 However, one of the most remarkable articulations of fragrance as a sweeping trail appears in Women in a Garden of 1893 (fig. 26) by the Dutch-Indonesian Symbolist painter Jan Toorop, whose flat, decorative depictions of willowy women provided inspiration to Margaret Macdonald and the Glasgow Four. Around this crayon and watercolor drawing, sinuous lines stream up the right-hand side of the silver-painted wooden picture frame and mingle with a cloud that snakes across the moon. These scent lines, or geurlijinen, emanate from the lily at the bottom right corner of the frame and are counterbalanced by a wave flowing across the painting, suggestive of both the long tresses of the sylphids, or spirits of the air, and the fragrance radiating from the flower they smell. It represents what the French call sillage, the wake of perfume that

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Fig. 26  Jan Toorop, Women in a Garden, 1893. Pencil and colored crayons and watercolor heightened with white on brownish paper, 24.5 × 37.5 cm. Private collection. Photo: Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo.

lingers after a woman has passed by. As they swirl out of the picture and up the upper left corner of the frame (which was designed by the artist), the wide arching curves overflow the picture’s borders, like scent emanating out of the painting into the real space of the viewer. Inspired no doubt by Renaissance and Dutch seventeenth-century trompe l’oeil paintings, in which a hand, a sleeve, or even a fly might seem to project out of the painting, Toorop’s “trompe-nez” illusion is nonetheless remarkable. Classen describes Toorop’s works as a “synaesthesic merging of sounds, scents and tactilities transposed onto a visual field,” and his use of fragrance trails is a key aspect of this.30 Featured in The Studio in 1893 and 1894, Toorop’s work was of international significance. In Art Nouveau advertising, fragrance trails provided a means to tantalize consumers with aromatic promise. The Belgian Art Nouveau graphic designer Henri Privat-Livemont designed a richly colored and highly sensual lithographic poster for Rajah Coffee and Tea (1899) that brings together ideas of scent, imagination, and Eastern allure (fig. 27). A bejeweled woman, surrounded by “Oriental” opulence, holds a cup of steaming, aromatic drink.31 Like the figure in Sargent’s painting, she appears mysterious and aloof, immersed in savoring both the fine

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Fig. 27  Henri Privat-Livemont, Rajah, 1899. Color lithograph on paper, 78.5 × 44.4 cm. Photo © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (2020).

exotic fragrance and the experience of “Oriental” indulgence. The delicate cup is held aloft for display, poised upon her fingertips. She seems captivated; her gaze is fixed upon it, and this dual emphasis upon vision and smell evokes an awareness of her meditative state: a reminder that to drink Rajah tea or coffee is to be transported by the senses to faraway places. The arabesque fragrance trail drifting above her head suggests that its flavors have triggered a train of mental associations, the swirls of steam signaling the twists and turns of her reveries. The vapors, like her thoughts, coalesce, forming with hallucinogenic clarity the word “Rajah” in white lettering, as if a whiff of the cup evokes a vision of the trade name. In this image, both the scent and the “scented vision” it inspires have

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a visible, near-tangible presence. Intriguingly, the poster appeared in the same year that scientists at the Paris Academy of Sciences suggested an alternative to the corpuscular theory, arguing that smells were rays of short wavelengths, analogous to light, sound, or X-rays.32 How these waves might react upon the nasal membrane was unknown, however, and the theory remained obscure. The Czech lithographer Alphonse Mucha produced a number of olfactory motifs in his Art Nouveau poster designs. “Chocolat idéal” (1897) depicts a mother bearing a tray laden with cups of cocoa for herself and her two eager, clamoring children (fig. 28). The composition is reminiscent of paintings of The Virgin and the Holy Children, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks (1503–6), while the arched top and vertical format of the design references Renaissance altarpieces more generally, lending the mother an air of sanctity as she proffers this nourishing drink to her young family. Chocolate-scented steam coils from the surface of the drinks, a mouth-watering twist on church incense. While pictorial fragrance trails could be wispy and ethereal, here the aroma is solid and substantial, taking the form of boldly defined arabesques, which in places become three-dimensional, as if carved out of wood. The waves of aroma, depicted in a translucent bluish-gray with tints of chocolate brown, form an abstract pattern that flows freely and whimsically up through the picture and into the spandrels, heralding the delicious taste and teasing the viewer with anticipatory thoughts of pleasure. Scent and Divisionism From Symbolist painters to Art Nouveau designers, progressive artists increasingly bypassed the problem of smell’s lack of a visible dimension by endowing smell with visible properties of color and form. Italian Futurist painters, who celebrated modern warfare and the clamor and commotion of the machine age, founded their art upon the tenet that painting could appeal to the senses with dynamic composition and expressive use of color to evoke and embrace the sensations of modernity.33 As Howes writes, “where the world-weary Symbolist retired to his den to dream up perfume symphonies, the rough-and-ready Futurist felt vitalized by the discordant proletarian bustle of the street or factory.”34 In his manifesto “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells” (1913), Carlo Carrà declared that pre-nineteenth-century painting was “the art of silence,” having not yet adequately transposed olfactory experiences into visual analogues. Even when artists “chose flowers, stormy seas or wild skies as their subjects,” they had failed to render “sounds, noises and smells in painting.”35 The answer, he suggested, was to move away from the depiction of the visible peripheries of sensory experience (e.g., the source, a smelling gesture, or an expression of physical response), and instead martial color and line to evoke direct and visceral responses to sensory stimuli. He believed that a synesthetic “co-operation of the

Fig. 28  Alphonse Marie Mucha, poster advertising “Chocolat idéal,” 1897. Color lithograph. Photo: Mucha Trust / Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 29  Luigi Russolo, Profumo, 1910. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 64.5 cm. MART, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. Photo: MART—Archivio fotografico e Mediateca.

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senses” was entirely possible and that an arsenal of visual techniques was at the disposal of artists attempting this form of “total painting.” Vibrant colors, he argued, such as “reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrrreddest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut” and “greens, that can never be greener, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam,” could seem to overwhelm vision with their intensity and spill into other sense perceptions.36 Different colors represented different odors, synesthetically reflecting their “dynamic essence.” The smells of railway stations and garages were red; cafés and restaurants emanated a silver, yellow, and purple aroma. Animal odors were yellow and blue; female odors were green, blue, and purple.37 Zigzags, wavy lines, and “the dynamic arabesque,” he claimed, conveyed the different “forms and intensities of vibration” that make up both sounds and smells. These visual formations could reflect the “arabesques of form and color” that Carrà believed to be impressed on the mind by successions of sounds, noises, and smells. “If we are shut in a dark room (so that our sense of sight no longer functions) with flowers, petrol or other strong-smelling things,” he claimed, “our plastic spirit gradually eliminates the memory sensations and constructs particular plastic wholes whose quality of weight and movement corresponds perfectly to the smells found in the room.”38 The artist could then transcribe these abstract mental visions into pictorial or sculptural form. Likewise, in his essay “The Art of Noises,” Carrà’s peer, Luigi Russolo, urged people to “cross a great modern capital” alive to the “the howl of mechanical saws, the joltings of a tram on its rails, the crackling of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags” and to translate these sounds into new art forms.39 Profumo (1910), a work that predates Italian Futurism by several years, comes closest to Carrà’s ideal with regard to the visual evocation of smell (fig. 29).40 A woman basks as swirling scent vapors envelop her face and whirl from her hair. Her face is tilted and in profile, giving prominence to the outline of the nose; her cheeks, parted lips, and eyelids are suffused with a hot fuchsia blush. The painting embraces both the esoteric nature of smell and the contemporary scientific urge to penetrate its mysteries. The trail of perfume pursues sinuous lines and curvilinear forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau with all its mystic symbolism yet is rendered according to the loosely scientific principles of Divisionist color theory.41 At close range, each linear stroke of red, blue, green, orange, yellow, and pink paint forms a mass of contrasting touches of pure pigment, meticulously juxtaposed, creating the effect of shifting scent particles. At a distance, the colors mix, becoming intense swirls of simple color. As the colors blend in the eye, the woman seems to fuse into the scented ambience, suggesting that fleeting moment in which, through perfume, the body becomes an airborne essence, as the combined scents of flesh and fragrance vaporize into the atmosphere. With its waves formed of particle-like strokes of paint, the image offers

Fig. 30  Béla Takách von Gyongos-Halasz, Incense, ca. 1910, as reproduced in Penrose Annual, 1910–11. Photo © Mary Evans Picture Library.

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a creative fusion of corpuscular theory and the Parisian scientific conceptualization of odor as rays and waves: scent is at once shimmering light, color, and waves. Chromatic division also conveys intangible sensations of odor in Incense (ca. 1910; fig. 30) by Béla Takách von Gyongos-Halasz, a Hungarian artist who was active in England and Germany. The painting depicts a young woman in long, flowing robes towering over an incense burner in which the vaporous effects of light capture the invisible yet luminous aroma emanating from it. With eyes closed, hands clasped to her chest, and head thrown backward as if by the force of a piercing light, the figure seems in a state of spiritual ecstasy. Looming out of the darkness, her body seems to levitate on clouds of scent, while the pleats down the column of her dress form a visual parallel to the vertical spires of smoke. As the incense rises, it forks into three jets of fumes which blast into the female figure, the central ray piercing her heart. Her face basks in an explosive radiance of divine light, achieved through Divisionist strokes of yellow, white, green, and blue paint. The painting reflects spiritual tendencies within the Divisionist movement. It was dedicated to, and by 1910 in the possession of, the leading spiritualist medium and theosophist Annie Besant, who is said to have seen it in an exhibition and admired it. One imagines the painting held a particular appeal for Besant, who described in her autobiography the sensuous pleasure she had found as a child in the “ritualism, incense and pomp” of Roman Catholicism, which she later drew upon in theosophical services.42 She is thought to have accepted it as a gift from the artist and to have hung it in the London headquarters of the Theosophical Society, of which she was president.43 An epiphany of light and scent, the brilliant colors of Incense enhance one another to produce an effect of shimmering luminosity. Up close, each dab of paint suggests a molecule of scent, made visible in the intense light. Yet from a distance, as in Russolo’s Profumo (see fig. 29), the strokes of bright, pure color fuse in the spectator’s eye, forming a visual parallel of the dissolution of volatile scent into the air. Smudges of translucent white paint overlay and soften these dashes of color, creating the sense of a vapory, scented fug. The Italian painter Vittore Grubicy de Dragon was convinced that Divisionism could open the way for a new multisensory aesthetic and “the treatment of radically new subjects, [and] for the expression of some aspects of the beauty of Nature that have never been dealt with before.”44 Grubicy believed that a contemporary “thirst for the new” in art would lead to a substitution of “hard, material and precise reality” for “something vague and indefinite.” “Exact perception,” he wrote, “will be prolonged by dissolving it like a chimerical vaporous aureole that permits the mind to ramble amidst incense fumes evoking mystical dreams.”45 In both Béla Takách’s Incense and Russolo’s Profumo, nineteenth-century color theory and

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the Divisionist techniques inspired by it enabled a new approach to the depiction of invisible, ineffable scent.46 Lost in Translation? All the techniques discussed in this chapter, as well as the intense naturalism discussed in the next, were used to index the presence of smell and to give an indication of its character. Yet no artist could circumvent the fact that the true experience of smelling an aroma is lost in translation. Smell evades capture in pictorial form, no matter how line, color, and form are pressed into service, just as “words, sentences and paragraphs” let “whole chunks of experience escape,” to quote Rindisbacher in The Smell of Books (1992).47 All we are really presented with is the smell of canvas and turpentine or of paper and ink. Like the fly seemingly resting on a Dutch seventeenth-century trompe l’oeil painting, or the scentless showy camellia and the woman who pretends to smell it, “scented visions” are a kind of sham. Indeed, to return to Watts’s Choosing, despite its luminous jewel-like colors and attention to detail, the painting can only simulate the visual beauty of the flower and suggest the perfume of the violets by association (see fig. 5). The painting offers nothing but an illusion, and the futile act of smelling an unscented flower depicted in it echoes the artist’s striving for an unattainable perfection, in which the sensuous world is truly realized in paint. Smell, we are reminded, is not visible and can never be captured by the artist. In the end, it comes down to this: the brain is not equipped to comprehend one sense from the perspective of another. At least, that is how the non-synesthetic majority think today, although, as the next chapter reveals, some nineteenth-century scientists, writers, and artists disagreed. So, how would viewers have experienced “scented visions” from circa 1850 to 1914? Could this visual lexicon for picturing smell optimize a synesthetic mode of viewing?

Chapter 4

Smelling Pictures

The mountains of Switzerland we associate with the flavour which the sun exhales from her pine forests. The banks of Tweed’s “silvery stream, glittering in the sunny beam” are ever in our minds seasoned with the odour of the whin blossom. —Robert S. Wyld, The Physics and Philosophy of the Senses, 1875

The eyes cannot smell, but they can come close to it. This was the understanding of the American Impressionist painter Charles Courtney Curran, who believed that it was possible to “paint the perfumes of the flowers.”1 Known for his light and breezy canvases of the heights of Cragsmoor, New York, he strove to do so in works such as Lady with a Bouquet (Snowballs) (1890), Chrysanthemums (1890), The Scent of the Rose (1890; see fig. 52), The Peris (1898; see fig. 51), The Perfume of Roses (1902; see fig. 50), The Dew (ca. 1900), The Cobweb Dance (1908), Apple Perfume (1911), and Breath of the Wild Azaleas (1920). In Palette and Bench (1909), a monthly journal for art students of which he and his wife were coeditors, he explained in his column “Class in Oil Painting”: “There is, more than one might think, a quality of suggestion possible in the painting of flowers, whereby the spectator can be made almost to smell the flowers in the picture he may be inspecting.”2 A year later, in the same journal, he stated: “The artist has by virtue of his profession the right to induce by suggestion any or all of those emotions which he experienced and which prompted him to paint the picture. His purpose in painting it is to induce like emotions in the spectator.”3 Arguing that the artist’s role is to trigger sensory memories by painting with such truth to nature as to make sensory recall effortless, he proceeded to a technical explanation of how to achieve this.

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To convey a flower’s scent in art, he argued, it was essential to capture its visual beauty: “So in painting any flower with a characteristic perfume try to be so imbued with the charm of the particular flower that the painting of it will carry all of its qualities to those who see the picture.” Visual examination was imperative, and he urged students to scrutinize blossoms under the microscope. Only through close looking and by observing properties invisible to the naked eye might one approach a visual experience of floral fragrance and realize the sensuous qualities of the rose that are “as much felt as seen.” Students should take a long, slow look, observing that “the petals of white roses resemble a multitude of dewdrops” and “light reflected directly from the outside of petals is cool, while light that goes through petals is warm.” It was this attention to detail, he argued, that rendered Emily Maria Spaford Scott’s watercolor still lifes of fruits and flowers so successful: “does not the appearance of delicate beauty and perfume of the flowers reside in the fact that the soft, quiet color of each petal loses into the next, as happens in flowers with semi-translucent petals?”4 Students seeking to replicate this scented effect, he suggested, should adopt “a vapory softness, a mellow, melting quality easiest secured by rubbing one color into another on a slightly roughened surface.”5 Curran likely knew Scott and her work from the New York Watercolor Club, of which she was vice president and he was an exhibiting member. For him, such attention to detail did more than simply suggest the idea of smell. Rather, it triggered an olfactory experience. Remembered Sensations Using terms that reveal their debt to contemporary scientific inquiries into sensory “association” and “sympathetic” reaction or “suggestion,” Curran described a time when he and his wife experienced an olfactory sensation inspired by an artwork: “The editors . . . can recall an occasion when they both experienced simultaneously the sensation of the scent of nasturtiums while looking at a particularly effective picture of that brilliant flower. It was too startling and vivid and mutual to have been a mere fancy. It was evidently an emotion born of suggestion.”6 Here, the language indicates that his teaching is rooted in physiological studies of the relationship between sensation and memory, including the work of the mid-Victorian physiologist Alexander Bain, who in 1855 described vivid multisensory experiences as the normal, healthy response to imagery. At the same time, the pacing and short sentence structure of the third person account echoes contemporary psychology case studies, lending Curran’s art writings their sense of scientific legitimacy. In The Senses and the Intellect, Bain had pointed toward a multisensory model of memory and imagination in which not only the eye but also all of the sensory organs were activated. Using language that reverberates with railway

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imagery, he argued that remembered sensations differed from primary sensations only in terms of intensity. Memories were fainter reruns of actual sense impressions; they were resuscitations of past sensory impressions that reinstated the “same parts as first vibrated to the original stimulus. The rush of feeling has gone on the old tracks, and seizes the same muscles, and would go the length of actually stimulating them to a repetition.”7 For this reason, he claimed, “the imagination of visible objects is a process of seeing; the musician’s imagination is hearing; the phantasies of the cook and the gourmand tickle the palate; the fear of whipping actually makes the skin to tingle.”8 Likewise, he supposed, when a dog’s nose quivers in its sleep, it is probably dreaming of rabbits. Writing of art, he wrote, “the representation of fragrant flowers gives an agreeable suggestion of the fragrance.” With a view, perhaps, to prompting his readers to test this, he illustrated the text with an image of a floral bouquet.9 Though physiologists stopped short of imagining gallery visitors sniffing at paintings, they did suggest that art fooled the senses. George Henry Lewes argued that a sculpted object painted to look like an apple might revive memories of the “sweetness and fragrance formerly experienced in conjunction with the colour and form of the apple.”10 Bain argued that while any of the properties of a rose, “the odour, the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk,” could “hoist the entire impression into view,” visual imagery was the most effective stimulus for reviving “remembered sensations.”11 The image was a shortcut to the idea of the object, a means of encoding or translating all the properties of the article into a memorable and recordable sign, which in turn could revive “remembered sensations” of all its properties. Recalling smell was not easy, but with “great effort of mind,” familiar smells could be “very nearly” recovered. A visual image could aid the process.12 Termed “sensory representations” by Henry Maudsley and “suggested feelings” by Grant Allen, the concept of “remembered sensations” was widely adopted in the physiology of the 1850s and beyond.13 This idea, in turn, filtered into some art criticism. For example, in 1875, in his book The Intellectual Life, the writer and painter Philip Gilbert Hamerton noted “the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered physical sensations . . . and that the most abstract thought is only removed from sensation by successive processes of substitution.” “To be able to see and hear well—to feel healthy sensations— even to taste and smell properly,” he argued, “are the most important qualifications for the pursuit of literature, and art, and science. If you read attentively the works of any truly illustrious poet, you will find that the whole of the imagery which gives power and splendour to his verse is derived from nature through one or other of these ordinary channels.”14 Then, in what may be a celebration of the sensory hedonism of contemporary Victorian Aestheticism, Hamerton noted that “the great creative intellects have never been ascetics; they have been rightly and healthily sensitive to every kind of pleasure.”15

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His words point to a belief in the multisensory potential of viewing that transformed the relationship between artist and viewer, assigning greater responsibility to audiences to protect and train their senses, the better for this experience. Degeneration and Nasal Exercise Bain’s account of “remembered sensations” informed how viewers approached looking at art as a multisensory experience for decades. Curran’s contemporary, the American educational psychologist Reuben Post Halleck, argued that honing the ability to replay sensory impressions in the mind was essential for the development of the intellect. In his pedagogical handbook The Education of the Central Nervous System (1896), he advocated training the senses by practicing the recall of different sensory impressions. Halleck was concerned that urban children suffered from stunted sensory development—their lack of rural access inhibiting their access to “the higher realms of thought and emotion conveyed in literature.” For this reason, he urged teachers to take inner-city children on visits to the countryside, where activities such as learning to identify flowers by their fragrance would increase blood supply to the olfactory lobe, and so strengthen it.16 In addition to advocating trips, he designed a series of classroom lesson plans to familiarize students with a variety of smells and develop their powers of recall. One such lesson involved presenting pupils with a phial of rose scent and asking them to picture its source. Next, teachers would show an image of a rose and invite the children to recall its scent. Drawing on the work of Bain and others, he argued that the idea of rose scent could instantly bring to mind the rose’s visual and tactile characteristics, and he suggested that with practice it would be possible to flick rapidly between recollections of all its sensory aspects.17 By strengthening the neural networks connecting sensory memories, this activity would improve the flow of associated ideas. A second lesson plan involved reading poems to form mental recollections of the smells described.18 This pedagogy was founded on a belief in the plasticity of a child’s brain: every time sensations are recalled, the memory tract is reinforced, making the recollection more definite and long-lasting. Like Finck, who had argued in 1880 for “nasal tutorage” and the “aesthetic enjoyment” of remembered odors as inspiration for the “mental laboratory of genius,” Halleck believed that sensory recall was vital for enhancing the study and aesthetic enjoyment of literature.19 His mode of sensory exercise involved maximizing one’s repertoire of memories of sensory experiences and practicing the ability to recall them. It should be the case, he suggested, that “when a word like ‘pear,’ ‘rose,’ ‘turnip’ or ‘codfish’ is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is a definite odour image.”20 Using the term “image” to mean a sensory impression (not necessarily visual), he suggested that “any student can find in Shakspere’s [sic] works a throng of images which demand a cultivated sense of

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smell for their interpretation and full comprehension.”21 The poet John Milton had selected flowers in Lycidas, he suggested, “not for their colours but for their fragrance” and so it was essential that readers, confronted by flower names in the text, had at their disposal “definite odour images to interpret them fully.”22 Likewise, readers with an undeveloped olfactory retention would be unable to access the scents of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Although Halleck did not extend his argument to looking at art, his work reflects a broader interest in the power of sensory recall. His pedagogy was shaped by contemporary debates around the retention, intensity, and normality of sensory memory. Halleck sided with the French psychologist Alfred Binet, arguing that “the normal man is one who can form definite images from all the senses, who can recall almost equally well the odour, colour and touch of a rose, the taste of whipped custard as well as the sound made in beating it.”23 He argued that only psychologists “with a poor sense of smell” would suggest that evolution had rendered the human olfactory lobe too defunct to recall odors. Rather, he believed that “civilized” peoples had simply neglected the skill but that they could, and indeed should, revive it through systematic training.24 Half a century earlier, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer had linked smell to survival and the recognition of what is and what is not safe to eat, as well as to male strength and power as a provider, given the role of smell in hunting.25 Halleck’s concerns about “the habitual neglect of the sense of smell in Western culture” can be seen in the context of debates about the depletion and perversion of the senses and the body, which was widely seen as linked to the demise of hunter-gatherer skills and an urban population reliant upon consumer society.26 At the same time, however, Darwinism linked the sense of smell to man’s animal past. While Halleck regarded the olfactory imagination as a vital element of the intellectual life and advocated nasal tutorage to shore up a declining sense, others, such as the German theorist Nordau, condemned the cultivation of the primal sense of smell as atavistic and regarded a heightened sensitivity to smell as pathological.27 Both lines of thought, however, reflected contemporary apprehension about the mental and physical malaise of humankind at the turn of the twentieth century. The City and Nervous Exhaustion While Halleck was concerned about sensory deprivation in the city and the subsequent degeneration of the sense of smell in civilized man, Nordau, in his book Degeneration (written in German in 1892 and translated into English in 1895), pointed to a pathologically heightened sensitivity to the senses caused by the sensory overload that bombarded the fin-de-siècle city-dweller. Cities had become a relentless kaleidoscope of street signs, billboards and posters, constant traffic, and bustling crowds, all accompanied by incessant cacophonies of sound and stench. The idea was not new. In Dombey and Son (1846), Dickens had

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described the “shriek,” “roar,” and “rattle” of trains and the view from the train windows as “dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches,” while George Henry Lewes, in The Physiology of Common Life (1859), had argued that cities generated a “vast and powerful stream of sensation” that barraged the never-resting mind.28 Despite the longevity of such ideas, Nordau declared that the changes wrought by urbanization upon man’s sensory life had occurred so fast that the senses had not yet accustomed themselves to the new demands placed upon them by the crowds and chaos of modernity, leading to collective nervous exhaustion.29 Indeed, clinicians applied the diagnosis of neurasthenia (from the Greek for “nerve-weakness”) to sufferers of a wide variety of mental and physical malaises, including depression and ennui.30 By the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of neurasthenia was rooted in the popular imagination. The historian Michelle Stacey has charted the history of “fasting girls,” who were considered indicative of the profound neuroses generated by the stresses of urban life. One such was Mollie Fancher, a Brooklyn girl, who became a tabloid sensation when she claimed that, following a streetcar accident in 1878, she had not consumed food or drink for twelve years.31 According to the psychologist Francis Galton, these “fasting girls who eat on the sly,” were afflicted by “a strange secret desire to attract attention,” “a morbid condition . . . to which imaginative women are subject, especially those who suffer . . . from hysteria.”32 A story not covered by Stacey but much reported at the time linked neurasthenia with hyperosmia—or a heightened sensitivity to smell. In 1905, the New York Times reported the trial of Inga Hanson, who was charged with perjury after impersonating blindness, deafness, dumbness, and paralysis in order to make a fraudulent suit for damages against the City Railway Company in Chicago. Like Fancher, Hanson claimed to have been injured in a streetcar accident that left her unable to walk, eat, or drink, adding that her sole sustenance for a month had been the scent of rose petals. According to the paper, her nurse testified under oath: “She would crush them in her hand and sniff their perfume for minutes at a time. Her bed was covered constantly with rose leaves, out of which she had crushed and inhaled the fragrance. She kept roses in her room always. She said the fragrance strengthened her. I know she seemed wonderfully braced up after breathing the odor.”33 While the nurse’s claim that the petals revived Inga links into a contemporary interest in perfume therapeutics and the craze for “smelling salts,” it also resonates with contemporary ideas about olfactory sensitivity as indicative of, or perhaps exacerbating, a nervous condition.34 The hyperartificial sensate and the stresses of the fast-paced city, symbolized by the streetcar, were linked in contemporary thinking with hyperesthesia, an excessive and morbid sensitivity to the senses. Similar ideas may lie behind “scented visions,” such as Henry Thomas Schafer’s The Boudoir Rose (1879), in which a woman smelling a rose reclines on a “fainting couch.” Likewise, while the synesthetic titling of Musk (1880) by the Victorian Classical Aestheticist Albert Moore

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can be seen as an olfactory equivalent of Whistler’s Nocturnes of the 1870s, its vision of a languorous female swooning in the scented decadence of an imagined classical world keys into the nineteenth-century concern and fascination with hypersensitivity to the senses and stresses of modern life. Applied to Aestheticism, the label “art for art’s sake” need not blinker us from seeing it as a product of wider social and cultural contexts beyond the pursuit of beauty. Aestheticism, Synesthesia, and Sensory Overload With its gaunt and enervated caricature of Burne-Jones, Beerbohm’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden (1904; see fig. 1) offered a twinkle-eyed dig at the collective hyperesthesia of the Victorian Aesthetic artists he revered. In particular, it parodies Maitland’s notorious attack on the “superfluity of extreme sensibility” in his 1871 article “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” which condemned Rossetti and Swinburne’s poetry for its “weary, wasting” effect upon the male art consumer, with Rossetti’s poems “Jenny” and “Troy Town” singled out for “stifling the senses with overpowering sickliness.”35 Here, the word “wasting” suggests the Victorian moral and medical panic over the sin of onanism, sparked by Claude-François Lallemand’s study (published in French in three volumes between 1836 and 1842 and in English in 1847) of the corruptive effects for the body and mind of male masturbation.36 While Beerbohm in 1904 saw the funny side, hyperesthesia, like neurasthenia, was widely considered a common neurosis of the fin-de-siècle, a clinical abnormality, often diagnosed in women, but also linked, as its etymology suggests, to an overwrought physical sensitivity to art, as had been invoked by the proponents of Aestheticism.37 Like his sensuous paintings, Rossetti’s poems of the 1870s and 1880s were saturated with scent imagery, leading critics to imagine a sickly sweet, miasmic perfume emanating from his works. In his article, Maitland condemned the sensualism of Rossetti’s works, finding “A Last Confession” to be flushed with an “unhealthy rose colour, stifling the senses with overpowering sickliness, as of too much civet.”38 Applying intersensory metaphor as a form of literary spice, William James Dawson claimed “My Sister’s Sleep” “affects us like some pungent and pervasive perfume,” while James Coulson Kernahan in 1891 likened Rossetti’s poetry to the “overpowering sweetness as of many hyacinths” so that “amid all the odorous deliciousness, we gasp for a breath of outer air again.”39 Likewise, John Campbell Shairp observed that “the fragrances that cross your path are those of musk and incense rather than of heather and mountain thyme” suggesting that Rossetti’s works seemed to imbue the stale air of enclosed, feminized, or Catholicized interiors.40 Here the suggestion of incense links Rossetti to the notion of a Brotherhood, while “stale air” tallies with the perception of the artist in later life as a recluse, closeted within his darkened town house on Cheyne Walk, by the polluted Thames at Chelsea.41 Meanwhile, the references to the

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fixatives civet and musk in Maitland’s and Shairp’s reviews suggest the animalic sexual femininity of the female figures in his work. Natural musk, as used in the 1860s, is a honey-like secretion produced in a gland, described by Piesse as located between “the anus and the pudendum” of the Tibetan male musk deer, while natural civet, scraped from the anal glands of Ethiopian civet cats, has a buttery consistency.42 By this period, these heavy scents were popularly associated with the medieval practice of accentuating vaginal odors, in contrast to the delicate scents worn by modern women.43 However, as Piesse explained in The Art of Perfumery (1855), though it was fashionable “for people to say that they do not like musk,” unbeknownst to consumers, most Victorian perfumes contained musk or civet as a base note.44 While these scents added sensuality, depth, and tenacity to perfumes, in the popular imagination a proclivity for animalics was perceived as uncivilized and atavistic, a throwback to man’s animal past. Their effect was seen as overpowering and deleterious to the nervous system, and, in imagining Rossetti’s poems to emanate these scents, the critics Maitland and Shairp hinted at the perceived degeneracy of Rossetti’s work. With their olfactory metaphors, these late Victorian critical responses to Rossetti drew on the contemporary language of health and disease and chimed with the popular science writings of Grant Allen on pleasure, pain, and aesthetics. In Physiological Aesthetics (1877), Allen set out “to exhibit the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relativity to our nervous organisation.”45 Drawing on the work of the physiologist Herbert Spencer, to whom he dedicated his book, and adopting, like Maitland, language that echoes that used in the period to describe the perils of masturbation, Allen argued that “the aesthetically beautiful is that which affords the Maximum of Stimulation with the Minimum of Fatigue or Waste.” Since pleasure or pain results from healthy or injurious actions upon the cells and tissues of the body, the “business of art” was, he argued, to combine “as many as possible pleasurable sensations” and to “exclude painful ones.” “Disagreeable smells,” he stressed, “attack the olfactory cells” and cause painful “disintegration or waste of nervous tissue,” and are “so loathsome as to form the ne plus ultra of the aesthetically hideous.”46 For this reason, olfactory sensations should be “admissible in poetry” only when their effect on the body and mind was enriching.47 The “glut or satiety which results . . . from cloying oneself with . . . strong perfumes, such as magnolia, stephanotis, and tube-rose” could reach such an “acute pitch” as to “yield painful sensations.”48 By drawing on this language of physiological aesthetics made popular by Allen, the critics Dawson, Kernahan, Maitland, and Shairp warned of the vigilance required when reading Rossetti’s poetry, and of the need to guard against the corrupting, emasculating “miasma” of these excessively sensual works, which crossed the line between olfactory pleasure and surfeit. Rossetti’s audiences, critics warned, should take care not to overload their senses. With their gorgeous colors and suggestions of music, perfumes, and the

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pleasures of taste and touch, his works could fatigue, corrupt, or intoxicate the senses—just as in George Eliot’s short story The Lifted Veil (1859), Latimer is overwhelmed by a deadly perfume emanating from a portrait of a Renaissance seductress. In a gallery in Prague, “Giorgione’s picture of the cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia” leaves the protagonist with “a strange poisoned sensation, as if [he] had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its effects.”49 Published in the same year as Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life, it shares some of her partner’s concern about the hyperstimulation of the senses in the modern world and the flawed role of the nose as a sentinel, guarding the body and mind.50 It is as if the painting—the very type that so inspired Rossetti—seduces and poisons with its deadly perfume, just as the woman Lucrezia Borgia, according to legend, secretly poisoned her lovers, as depicted in Rossetti’s own painting Lucrezia Borgia (1860–61). Eliot’s imaginative take on the multisensory “affect” of painting links to the bohemian appeal of synesthesia, which was only enhanced by the condition’s clinical links to the modern neuroses of neurasthenia, hyperesthesia, hysteria, and sensory hallucination. The art critic Fénéon noted Baudelaire’s belief that “all refined nervous systems should be able to experience the unity of the senses” as a healthy norm.51 For many writers and thinkers, however, to experience and respond to an artwork too viscerally, whether to the emotiveness of a Giorgione or to the sensory surfeit of a Rossetti—was to tread the borders of sanity. A Flight of Pink Roses In his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Francis Galton, a key figure in the development of the study of behavioral difference, reflected on the “types” most susceptible to the sensory imagination as part of his broader project of measuring the variable traits of inherited human intelligence according to race and gender. Women and children with creative sensibilities, such as novelists and musicians, were, he claimed, most receptive to sensory hallucinations, in contrast to men of science and other “learned people,” who “think in words rather than pictures.”52 By way of example, he cited an account by Rose Kingsley of her synesthetic experience of numbers as colored. Kingsley, known for her writings on travel, art, and horticulture, was a pioneer settler of Colorado Springs before she returned to England to set up a girl’s school in Leamington Spa. She shared an interest in Galton’s ideas with her father, the celebrated novelist Charles Kingsley, and referred to her experience of colored numbers as “visualisations.”53 Galton also drew upon an autobiographical narrative by Mary Eliza Haweis. Haweis was an English artist, illustrator, novelist, and writer on such themes as The Art of Beauty (1878), The Art of Dress (1879), and The Art of Decoration (1881). A prolific contributor to the Lady’s Realm, she was known as an arbiter

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of elegance and a paragon of artistic discernment for the Victorian Aesthetic Movement in the home. Having emphasized Haweis’s creative imagination, Galton cited her account of a recurring synesthetic vision: All my life long, I have had one very constantly recurring vision, a sight which came whenever it was dark or darkish, in bed or otherwise. It is a flight of pink roses floating in a mass from left to right, and this crowd or mass of roses is presently effaced by a flight of “sparks” or gold speckles across them. The sparks totter or vibrate from left to right, but they fly distinctly upwards. They are like tiny blocks, half gold, half black, rather symmetrically placed behind each other, and they are always in a hurry to efface the roses; sometimes they have come at my call, sometimes by surprise, but they are always equally pleasing. What interests me most is that, when a child under nine the flight of roses was light, slow, soft, close to my eyes, roses so large and brilliant and palpable that I tried to touch them: the scent was overpowering, the petals perfect, with leaves peeping here and there, texture and motion all natural. They would stay a long time before the sparks came, and they occupied a large area in black space. Then the sparks came slowly flying and generally, not always, effaced the roses at once, and every effort to retain the roses failed. Since an early age the flight of roses has annually grown smaller, swifter, and farther off, till by the time I was grown up my vision had become a speck, so instantaneous that I had hardly time to realise that it was there before the fading sparks showed that it was past. This is how they still come.54 For Galton, Mrs. Haweis’s account demonstrated that multisensory visions belonged to a puerile, feminine disposition. The vision was most intense during childhood, when the “flight of pink roses” was so intense that scent seemed to exude from the almost palpable blooms. While at first she had supposed the visions to represent a divine encounter, as she grew older, she rationalized it in psychological terms, and as a mature woman, they grew fainter. Galton categorized Haweis not as “disturbed” but as one of “a notable proportion of sane persons . . . moving in society and in normal health” who experience hallucinations. While Galton described such experiences as “normal” among sane people, it is also clear that he viewed them as typical of creative women with a tendency to fantasize.55 Rotten Heads and Wallflowers Women, and especially creative women, were widely held to have a heightened sense of smell and to be more susceptible to its effects upon the body and mind.56 Mental health clinicians also thought them more likely to experience olfactory hallucinations.57 An editorial in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research

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of 1906 entitled “Olfactory Hallucinations Associated with Subconscious Visual Perceptions” provides an intriguing account of olfactory hallucination.58 The subject was a Miss Goddard, who claimed in a letter to the editor that years earlier, during a visit to an exhibition on London’s Bond Street, she had encountered a painting “representing a pyramid of human heads in various and advanced stages of decomposition.” Her response to the painting was abnormally visceral: I walked towards it, looking at something which had taken my attention in my catalogue, when I became conscious of a most horrible and overwhelming stench such as would probably have been caused by remains of the kind in reality. I did not know anything about the picture, its subject, or its position in the gallery, and it was not until I was close to it that I perceived what it was at all. Sight had, therefore, nothing to do with suggesting the odour to the sense of smell. I mentioned the fact to the friends who were with me, but they only laughed at me and said there was nothing of the kind, that it was merely imagination worked upon by the horrid subject of the painting.59 This, she claimed, had not been her only experience of this kind. At a recent Royal Academy show, she had become “suddenly aware of a delightful scent of wallflowers, stocks etc, such as one would expect in a lovely old fashioned garden.” People do not generally use a scent of that kind (wallflower), and I was wondering where it came from, when on looking up, I saw a painting representing just such an old garden, and which I think I should have passed without seeing, if the scent had not made me look round. This was not all. Before leaving the Academy, I usually go once through the galleries, just as they are closing, for one last look round when the crowd has gone. I did so on this occasion, and, on passing the picture, the same thing happened again. I did not know I was near it, until the scent of the flowers made me look up. Without this I should have certainly missed seeing it the second time, as I had quite forgotten in which gallery it was hanging.60 Like Curran’s account of the fragrant experience of looking at a picture of nasturtiums, the language and pacing here echoes contemporary clinical case studies of the period featuring hallucination and hysteria. Whether Miss Goddard really existed and supplied her account as published is intriguing. At any rate, despite her apparent conviction in her psychic powers for detecting supernatural pictorial emanations, the journal offered up her experience to readers for rational inquiry. Founded in 1882 by a distinguished group of Cambridge scholars, the Society for Psychical Research was the first of its kind to dedicate itself to the rational

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investigation of seemingly paranormal phenomena through the promotion and support of research and the exposure of hoaxes. The society’s journal was its principal forum for debate and dissemination of information about current developments in the field. A skeptic of spiritualism and the paranormal, editor and founding member Frank Podmore suggested an explanation based on theories of sensation, perception, and the unconscious. Rejecting Miss Goddard’s contention that “sight had nothing to do with suggesting the odour to the sense of smell,” he insisted that “there can be little doubt that the hallucinations were due to Miss Goddard’s having already seen the pictures subliminally . . . before becoming aware of the smell.”61 Informed by psychological investigations into the relationship between unconscious cerebration and conscious mental processes, he explored ideas about the potential of the mind to conjure subjective sensations of odor, aroused by subconscious sightings of the canvases. Podmore’s conviction that Miss Goddard had been primed for the reception of multisensory phenomena by the visual content of the paintings reveals an awareness of ideas about the role of expectation upon perception. In Illusions: A Psychological Study (1881), James Sully had argued that on looking at figurative paintings, we suspend belief, surrendering ourselves to the illusion of art and becoming oblivious of the external world. The expectant state of mind, customary on entering a picture gallery, has the effect of allowing one to forget “the undeceiving circumstances, the flat surface, the surroundings, and so on,” enabling us to deceive and indulge the senses.62 Yet total artistic absorption, Sully argued, should only be fleeting, given “the superior force of present realities.” Miss Goddard’s steadfast belief in her supernatural powers transgressed the parameter between illusion and hallucination. Podmore’s analysis obliquely questions her sanity. Her testimony, he implies, is not proof of cottage garden scents in the Royal Academy rooms, and he notes that her companions denied that the New Bond Street gallery reeked of the dead. Resorting to gendered inflections typical of turn-of-the-century accounts of the olfactory imagination, he also indicates that Miss Goddard is somewhat removed from the enlightened spheres of the Society, her story having reached the Society third-hand through an all-female grapevine before she was invited to write in. While it was not uncommon for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art critics to playfully imagine smelling a picture, in comments that were variously whimsical, tongue in cheek, hyperbolic, or metaphorical, Miss Goddard’s resolute belief in her heightened sensory illusion was highly suspect.63 Olfactory Hallucination As the testimonies of Mrs. Haweis and Miss Goddard suggest, the olfactory imagination was often associated with female creative sensibility. However, despite Galton’s assertions of the normality of sensory illusion, an important shift took

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place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mental health pathologists increasingly viewed illusory sensations through the lens of mental disturbance and, despite Curran and Halleck’s writings, the apparent potential of the visual image to activate nonvisual subjective sensations was no longer widely regarded as rooted in ordinary, healthy perception. In “Odors and Life” (1874), Papillon cited the case of a woman who “declared that she could not bear the smell of a rose,” and “was quite ill when one of her friends came in wearing one, though the unlucky flower was only artificial.”64 An account was also given of “a woman affected by disorder of all her senses. Whenever she saw a well-dressed lady passing, she smelt the odor of musk, which was intolerable to her. If it were a man, she was distressingly affected by the smell of tobacco.” Papillon also cited a case reported by François Lélut, a physician at Salpêtrière, the Parisian asylum specializing in the study of hysteria. This described an inmate “who fancied that she constantly perceived a frightful stench proceeding from the decay of bodies she imagined buried in the courts of that institution.”65 Experiences such as this were deemed sudden and intense due to the immediacy of the neural impact. Smell was believed to have a particularly direct connection to the central nervous system. As Bain had noted in 1855, the olfactory nerves make up the first pair of cranial nerves.66 By the later nineteenth century, this perceived neurological propinquity was often drawn upon to explain the close association of the olfactory imagination with neural pathology and all the connotations of nervous disorders. Accounts of visual imagery inducing illusory olfactory sensations were often featured alongside case studies of olfactory hallucinations, and, by the 1890s, a plethora of publications were featuring relevant case studies.67 In a survey of existing literature published in the Journal of Mental Science in 1899, St. John Bullen, pathologist to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, Yorkshire, described the “olfactory hallucinations of the insane” as smelling “foul, filthy, putrefying, deathly or corpse-like.”68 An entry on “smell hallucination” in the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892) listed “the smells of faeces, rotting bodies, burning, cooking, sulphur and electricity” as “the most common complaints.”69 Thought to be a response to the hyperstimulation of the modern city, these hallucinations conjure urban stench such as the sulfuric smog of the 1890s, as well as associations with the earlier Victorian period of shallow graves, brimming cesspools, and overcrowded slums. Since smell indicates the decomposition of matter, medical accounts of olfactory hallucinations resonated with ideas of the incipient foulness of the female body. There was much debate as to whether cases of parosmia (olfactory hallucination) and kakosmia (stinking hallucinations) were in fact hallucinations or whether they were real odors, symptomatic of disease.70 For example, St. John Bullen argued that olfactory hallucinations were caused by “enfeeblement of the olfactory lobe” and the “discharge of lesions in the olfactory quarters of the brain.”71 On the other hand, John Hughlings Jackson, a physician and neurologist

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at the London Hospital, described the case of a woman disturbed by the stench of “burning dirty stuff,” whose postmortem revealed a putrid “uterine fibroid, the size of a hen’s egg.”72 According to Dr. Maurice Craig and Dr. Edwin Goodall, also based at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, almost one-third of patients with ovarian disease at London’s Bethlem asylum suffered olfactory hallucination.73 Parosmia was linked to cerebral disease, epilepsy, syphilis, alcoholism, and traumatic cerebral injury but was primarily regarded as a female condition associated with “sexual perversion.” Bullen linked the condition to uterine disorders, sexual addiction, and female sexual disturbance, that is, “masturbation, sexual excess, lactation, climacteric insanity, etc.”74 Indeed, olfactory hallucination came to be associated with all the major factors thought to contribute to hysteria, the symptoms of which were said to include faintness, nervousness, insomnia, muscle spasm, reproductive disorders, depression, loss of appetite, and sexual dissatisfaction.75 To Frank Podmore and his readers, Miss Goddard’s account of the fetor and fragrance of paintings would have suggested at best the hallucinations of a hysteric and at worst the decomposition of her body or brain. The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in the New England Magazine in 1892, offers an interesting perspective on synesthesia and olfactory hallucination in women diagnosed with nervous disorders. In this short fictional account of a woman’s enforced postnatal confinement and resultant descent into insanity, the narrator craves company and intellectual stimulation, having little to occupy her beyond the yellow-patterned wallpaper that covers the room of the dreary, window-barred nursery in which she is interned.76 Forbidden to write and think, prescribed for and infantilized by her physician-husband, who has diagnosed her as possessing “a slight hysterical tendency,” she becomes agitated during her “rest cure,” which involves complete inactivity, coerced feeding, and isolation.77 She begins to fixate on the wallpaper, staring at its ornamental design until its “tortuous sinuousness” invades the recesses of her mind. As she watches with unsteady eyes, the pattern wavers and metamorphoses into “a kind of ‘debased Romanesque’ with a delirium tremens . . . waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.” This description suggests the effects of the phosphates that she is prescribed and insinuates that she is hostage not only to the institution of marriage but also, perhaps, to an addiction imposed upon her by her husband—an addiction that sedates and further constrains her within those bleak four walls.78 The columns of the pattern form a cage, symbolic of her incarceration and the author’s frustration with the patriarchal ideologies that governed woman’s place within late nineteenth-century society. Behind the wallpaper’s stripes or

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bars, she begins to identify strange moving shapes that coalesce into a female form, trapped, just like her. The theme of decay runs through the story. The wallpaper’s florid arabesques resemble the twisted, mushroom-like sewer miasmata described by “The Investigator” in The Times.79 She writes, “if you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools budding and sprawling in endless convolutions,—why, that is something like it.”80 Later the figure in the wallpaper assumes the shape of “a multi-headed creature and is throttled as it tries to escape the relentless pattern.” “She is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles.” The toadstool buds become the figure’s many heads.“ They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off, and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.”81 If the rotting heads seem emblematic of the narrator’s mental collapse, her olfactory hallucinations, evoked by the sight of the wallpaper, corroborate this reading. The “dull yet lurid” wallpaper is described as “repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow” that reminds one of “old foul, bad yellow things.”82 It gives off an odor that worsens with damp weather. The smell, she writes “is like the colour of the paper! A yellow smell.” Her gaze is synesthetic; she looks at the yellow paper with its serpentine pattern that echoes pictorial fragrance trails and smells its “sickly sulphur tint.”83 Since sulfur was one of the most common odors perceived by parosmia patients (an urban smell for an urban phenomenon), Gilman evokes the writings of mental pathologists on the theme of hallucination and mental health.84 Indeed, in 1872 the London mental health pathologist and Quaker Daniel Hack Tuke had described sulfuric-smelling hallucinations as “strangling”—a term that resonates with the narrator’s vision of heads being garroted as they try to escape the design.85 In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator displays symptoms of parosmia associated, as we have seen, with the hyperstimulation of the city, as well as with tumors and nervous disorders, particularly at times of female reproductive change: here, lactation. Only the narrator can detect the enduring odor that she describes seeping out of the yellow wallpaper and trailing her every move. Wherever she goes, the smell pervades the air around her head. It gets into her hair, and she can catch it by surprise if she makes a sudden head movement. Like a stalker, it goes wherever she goes, and it is invasive, like the “miasma vampires” of the 1840s. “It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.”86 Much like the depressive smog that penetrates Marian’s home in Gissing’s New Grub Street, published the previous year, it looms over her while she sleeps and wakes her at night. The evidence in the text points toward the odor emanating not from supernatural forces harbored in the wallpaper but from her own diseased body or mind.87 However, Gilman maintains a degree of ambiguity. This

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“yellow smell” that “creeps,” “seeps,” “hovers,” and “hangs” could be real—the result of a visceral disturbance or bodily corruption—or simply “a fancy” arising from the absence of other sources of mental stimulation. In her justification “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (1913), Gilman expressed her discontent with the medical profession’s prescriptions for neuralgia, a form of nerve pain associated with neurasthenia, which she believed to be caused by the restraints placed on her sex and class by patriarchal notions of ideal womanhood.88 In the story, the protagonist journals her husband’s attempts to curb her creative sensibilities. One phrase is particularly reminiscent of Galton’s accounts of the hallucinatory propensity of female writers versus the ability of men of science to repress the imagination: “He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency.”89 Later she writes, “I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbours, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least.”90 Despite her husband’s warnings, the reader is left championing the narrator’s creative sensibilities and lamenting the inhumane curtailment imposed by the patriarchal medical establishment, which leaves her staring at the wallpaper and haunted by its imagined smell. At the same time, literary historian Susan Lanser has shown that the narrator’s loathing for the yellow wallpaper, with its “peculiar” “yellow smell,” chimes with Gilman’s own xenophobia toward Chinese immigrants. In her home state of California, fear of the so-called “yellow peril” was on the rise in the early 1890s, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with early eugenics groups calling for “American Protection” through controlled breeding and restricted entry.91 Years later, in 1916, in her journal The Forerunner, she proclaimed that America has become a “verminous dump” for Europe’s “social refuse,” with immigration creating “multi-foreign cities” that are “foul, ugly, and dangerous . . . offensive to every sense: assailing the eye with ugliness, the ear with noise, and the nose with smells.”92 For Gilman, the sensations of the modern multicultural city were the cause of neurasthenia. Art and Sensory Overload The narrator’s parosmia in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Miss Goddard’s “psychic” powers for smelling paintings, Mrs. Haweis’s visions of scented roses, and Inga Hanson’s ability to subsist on nothing but the scent of roses can all be seen within the context of nineteenth-century fears of sensory overload. They all represent responses to the synesthetic, artificial, hypersensate experience of modern life. This climate of collective hyperesthesia contextualizes the “scented visions” of the nineteenth century, from Rossetti’s hypersensual “stunners” to Curran’s escapist fairy fantasies.

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So what then should we make of nineteenth-century ideas about the olfactory experience of looking at depictions of smell in art? Halleck did not write about whether visual images could prompt olfactory memory in the same manner as text. Yet, following his reasoning and that of Bain’s before him, we might expect even the title of Moore’s Musk (1880) to have triggered a sense of the perfume. Clearly, as literary historian Janice Carlisle has noted, olfactory imagery (whether visual or verbal) was “deemed more immediate and thus more potent” than current formulations allow.93 In reality, however, the metaphorical synesthetic qualities inherent in the visual and verbal languages of Victorian Aestheticism were unlikely to leave the viewer gasping for air, as Kernahan imagined doing while reading Rossetti’s sonnet Willow-wood. Nevertheless, the idea of looking at an art image and experiencing its olfactory qualities continued to resonate in the nineteenth century, even as it was aligned with the pathological. While the conceit of imagining smelling a picture was as common in nineteenth-century art criticism as the phrase “I can almost smell the . . .” is today, it takes on an intriguing hue when set against stories such as those of Miss Goddard’s or the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” But perhaps Miss Goddard was not alone in having an olfactory experience while walking through the Royal Academy. Moving between Millais’s Murthly Moss, Perthshire and Alma-Tadema’s Roses of Heliogabalus (see fig. 58), a critic at the Summer Exhibition of 1888 observed an experience of olfactory fade, that is to say, of being “wafted from the breezy Scottish moors to the voluptuous atmosphere of a Roman Emperor’s banqueting hall heavy with the scent of roses.”94 A figure of speech, no doubt, but one rich with connotation.

pa r t i i

D e c o d ing Smell

Chapter 5

Scent, Memory, Visions

Of odors old and dusty fills the brain An ancient flask brought to light again And forth the ghosts of long-dead odors creep. —Baudelaire, The Flask, 1857

According to a diary entry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s wife, Emily, in November 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Millais was “beguiled into sweeping up leaves and burning them” while visiting the Tennysons’ family home at Freshwater, Isle of Wight.1 The memory of that bonfire may have furnished Millais with the inspiration for Autumn Leaves (1855–56), a scene of four girls tending to a bonfire (fig. 31). Returning from his honeymoon in August 1855, he began work on the painting that autumn in the grounds of his new home, Annat Lodge in Perthshire, Scotland, where he spent the first two years of his married life with Effie. As he worked, he may have recalled the words of his former host’s song A Spirit Haunts the Year’s Last Hours (1830): “My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves / At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves.”2 Both Millais’s painting and Tennyson’s song evoke the haunting poignancy of the aromas of moldering and burning leaves, with smell visualized in Millais’s painting by what a critic for the Athenaeum described as “the blue smoke” which “oozes and strains through the sappy and half-withered leaves.”3 Both painting and song are expressions of what the French novelist George Sand in 1855 described as “the link between memories and sensations that everyone knows, and cannot explain.”4 They evoke the phenomena described by the French philosopher Maine de Biran in 1815, when he observed that an intense, emotional experience in childhood, if associated with a smell, can result in the lifelong potential for that smell to tear off the veil between heart and thought, rendering us momentarily young again, so that

Fig. 31  John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–56. Oil on canvas, 104.3 × 74 cm. Manchester Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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“we feel all that we have lost, and melancholy seizes our soul.”5 Both works are suffused with wistfulness at a time when the nostalgic associations of autumn were also redolent with mid-Victorian ideas about the depressive effects of the smell of rotting matter—miasma—upon the body and mind. Effie Millais wrote in her diary that Millais “wished to paint a picture of beauty without subject.”6 As the first of his mood pictures, Autumn Leaves moves away from Victorian narrative painting and the religious and literary stories that dominated early Pre-Raphaelitism toward the spirit of il dolce far niente that characterized Victorian Aestheticism. It is important for this book because it demonstrates that scented reverie and the notion of intense sensory experiences were central to Aestheticism from its very conception. Moreover, it marks a turning point toward the evocation of natural scents and their emotional affect in the art of this period. Prior to Autumn Leaves, Millais painted The Violet’s Message (1854), a “cabinet-picture” in which a girl opens a billet-doux filled with violets. Viewers of the painting would have appreciated not only the Victorian language of flowers (in which the violet conveys fidelity) but also the notion of a personal, idiosyncratic language of scent, as the fragrant petals trigger their own set of memories and emotions. At some point in the months after completing Autumn Leaves, Millais painted Pot Pourri (1856), in which two girls shred roses into a china bowl, and Spring (Apple Blossoms) (begun 1856 and completed 1859), in which young women lounge beneath boughs laden with blossoms, tasting curds and cream. Millais claimed that while he was painting the latter, bees would settle on the blossoms, “thinking them real flowers,” a comment intended to invoke his artistry but also, perhaps, the olfactory resonance of the work.7 Each of these works suggests the emotive power of scent and paves the way for a number of iconic works of Victorian Aestheticism in which scent plays a key role, including paintings as diverse as Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) and Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86). In his several versions of Proserpine (fig. 32), Rossetti evoked scent through the depiction of curling fumes rising from the goddess’s censer and accentuated it through the swirling folds of the figure’s dress, the serpentine pose, and the winding ivy (symbolizing clinging memory). Given scent’s association with memory, the evocation of incense here enhances the idea of the spring goddess imprisoned in the gloom of Hades, brooding over memories of her former life. In the chalk on paper version of 1880, the silvery, monochrome effect creates a haziness that, like Beata Beatrix (1864–70; see fig. 37), simultaneously suggests a scented ambience, contemporary photography, and a memory image. In Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (fig. 33), Sargent likewise evoked an ethereal scented haze and the sense of an image recalled from memory. According to Edwin Austin Abbey, the picture of two young girls lighting Chinese lanterns in a garden at twilight was inspired by a glimpse of lanterns hanging among trees and lilies, seen while boating together on the Thames at Pangbourne.8

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Fig. 32  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Proserpine, 1880. Colored chalks on paper, 119.5 × 56 cm. Private collection. Photo © Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London / Bridgeman Images.

Nevertheless, like Autumn Leaves (also an atmospheric, evening garden scene of youth), Sargent’s painting can be read as presenting a scent-triggered memory of childhood. Here, the effect is achieved through the abundance of lilies, their stamens dusty with pollen, and by the nocturnal effects of candlelight and setting sun, captured in quick dabs of paint. The painting has a nostalgic quality that chimes with nineteenth-century writings on scent and memory, such as Baudelaire’s account of the “profound magical charm, with which the past, Restored to life, makes us inebriate!”9

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Fig. 33  John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–86. Oil on canvas, unframed dimensions 174 × 153.7 cm. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

Autumn Leaves In Autumn Leaves, a dusky twilight closes over the deep blue of the distant hills, tinged with the fading embers of the setting sun. The painting captures chill autumn air on ruddy faces, the rustle of wind through half-bare trees, and a desolate garden beneath a solemn, gray sky. A lamentation of the passing of summer and of the transience of youth and beauty, it is suggestive of both the dying day and the end of the year. The doleful expression of the girls in their somber-toned dresses augments this pensive mood, which, as art historian Malcolm Warner indicates, is also present in the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, including Rossetti’s “Autumn Song” (1848), Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears” (1854), and Allingham’s “Late Autumn” (1865).10 Following the death of his close friend the artist Walter Deverell from Bright’s disease in February 1854, and with Effie pregnant with their first child, the twenty-seven-year-old Millais had much to reflect on. At the same time, as Kate Flint has argued, the painting reflects the nation’s grief and disillusionment following the Crimean War, which Millais responded to directly in Peace Concluded (1856) and News from Home (1856–57). Perthshire, home to the 42nd (Highland) Regiment, had suffered significant losses. On October 25, 1854, 39 of the regiment were killed at

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the Battle of Balaclava, and 227 died from wounds and diseases incurred in that combat.11 In responding to the nation’s mourning, Millais adopted the historical tradition of vanitas painting: drifts of smoke symbolize the ephemeral nature of life, while the fallen leaves denote time and mortality. In a gesture of offering, the central and eldest girl (modeled by Sophie Gray, Millais’s sister-in-law) holds out a handful of leaves, to be dropped like a votive offering upon the burning pile. Her sacrifice, Millais seems to suggest, will have no impact upon the destructive hand of time; decay is inevitable, and, like the leaves, the girls will also in the course of time wither and die. As art historian Jason Rosenfeld observes, we see “the dawn of nostalgia and absence” on their faces, just as Millais was reflecting in this period on “his own mortality and the recession of experience into the past.”12 Taken together with Wandering Thoughts (ca. 1855), in which a grieving woman wears a corsage of scented-leaf geranium for comfort, we see that ideas around aroma and nostalgia informed Millais’s art during this period of soul-searching.13 Autumn Leaves evokes a sense of reverential stillness, created through the lack of narrative and by what Ruskin described as the girls’ “quiet reverie.”14 For Millais, the painting was about the inward gaze. In a letter to Stephens, he stated his intention that the picture “awaken by its solemnity the deepest religious reflection. I chose the subject of burning leaves as most calculated to produce this feeling.”15 Holman Hunt also read the painting this way. In his autobiographical history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, published in 1905, he claimed to remember Millais saying in 1851, “Is there any sensation more delicious than that awakened by the odour of burning leaves? To me nothing brings back sweeter memories of the days that are gone; it is the incense offered by departing summer to the sky, and it brings one a happy conviction that Time puts a peaceful seal on all that has gone.”16 This meditative mood was achieved in several ways. As Warner observes, the autumnal haze creates a mysteriousness that, like Rossetti’s chalk Proserpine, “suggests an image from the memory, the imagination or a dream, rather than a scene directly perceived.”17 The glowing sunset lends the girls an almost supernatural aura. The rising smoke that hovers, ghost-like, in the air portends the raising of thoughts and apparitions—and the two dark-haired sisters, dressed in mourning, direct their gaze out of the painting and into the past. The painting can be seen as a representation of a memory of childhood. At the same time, the children act as “waymarkers,” guiding the viewer toward memory and introspection. Painted in the same year that Bain published The Senses and the Intellect (1855), Autumn Leaves plays with the power of the visual to act synesthetically, eliciting “remembered sensations” of the autumnal aroma and stirring memories and emotions. Moreover, in the context of Bain’s work, the leaves on the bonfire in Millais’s painting might evoke the fragility of memory. The freshest and greenest or most vibrant and richly colored leaves on top of the heap could

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suggest vivid and re-attainable recollections, while the crisp and drab, dank and slimy leaves, below and within, could convey the most faded and irrecoverable relics of the mind. Smell and Loss The spiritual sentiment sought by Millais reflects the mood found in a number of writings in the 1850s about the propensity for natural scents to inspire meditation on the past. In 1858 (one year before Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope), Charles Kingsley published his thoughts on “minute philosophy”—the theological revelations of the miniscule in nature—in Fraser’s Magazine. In “My Winter Garden,” the Broad Church priest, author, and social reformer described the melancholic pleasure of reverie triggered by inhaling the “turpentine fragrance” that pervaded a fir grove near his home in Eversley, leading him to imagine himself alone in a “dead world . . . so full of life.” The smell of “dead leaves” was, he wrote, “far sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral. There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs over the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen. Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall never see again on this earth.”18 For Kingsley, a detractor of Catholicism, Tractarianism, and High Church “bells and smells,” the simple purity of pine scent acts as a gateway to spiritual meditation. It quiets the mind, enhancing his meditation on the sound of the wind among the branches, which in turn inspires visions of those he has loved and lost. In his novel of 1857, entitled Two Years Ago, he referred to the power of scent to stir remote, dormant memories: “delicate scents . . . sometimes wake up long-forgotten dreams, which seem memories of some ante-natal life.”19 The potency of smells for unleashing the visions of the mind’s eye, evoking memories of bygone days and raising the specters of departed loved ones, held an imaginative appeal and was a recurrent theme for numerous essayists, novelists, and ghost story writers.20 In an anonymous article on the idiosyncrasies of the sense of smell, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1856) imagined a scenario in which scent fleetingly evokes the apparition of a deceased lover: “An open door wafts a favourite perfume to us, and she whom we loved stands in passing beauty at our side.” Just as the perfume induces the ghostly manifestation, heavy smells are described as so overpowering as to vanquish the entranced state; the vision fades and the moment passes: “Stale musk or nauseous camphor breathe upon us, and palls and shrouds hide once more the faded forms of those that are gone to a better home.”21

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Fig. 34  George Dalziel, after George John Pinwell, The Sisters, in Graphic 3 (May 6, 1871): 416. Photo: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Scent and Lost Innocence Nostalgia for lost innocence and the simplicity of youth was also a favored theme of mid-nineteenth-century accounts of scent-induced memory. Tennyson’s “A Dream of Fair Women” (1833) was frequently cited in these “scent souvenirs,” as Bible scholar the Reverend Francis Jacox called them in his article on smell, memory, and literature published in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1863.22 Given the popularity of Tennyson’s lines “The smell of violets, hidden in the green / Pour’d back into my empty soul and frame / The times when I remember to have been / Joyful and free from blame,” we can read the prostitute in Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (1859; see fig. 12) as being lost in memories of former innocence, triggered by the scent of the violets and primroses now fallen to the floor. Indeed, the lost innocence of her country youth might be likened to the purity conjured by the lounging girls in Millais’s Spring (Apple Blossoms), completed that same year.

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By the 1870s, the link between childhood memory, the scent of spring flowers, and female moral character in an age of urban migration was well established in the popular imagination—as seen in an engraving after George John Pinwell’s pen and ink design The Sisters (1871) (fig. 34). In this scene of urban drudgery, a seamstress stoops to savor the pure sweet fragrance of a potted primrose on her worktable. The gesture indicates the moral rectitude of the woman and her sister, who are present to the simple joys and pleasures of nature, while the flower and its scent act as a memento of country lanes and rural childhood, a portal to a nostalgic realm. An ancestral portrait hanging on the wall suggests comparative former wealth and that, despite falling on hard times, the sisters retain a shabby gentility. Unlike the violets and primroses wilting on the floor in Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past, here the primrose is flowering in its new home, although, like the spinsters, it can hardly be said to be flourishing. No longer embedded in its grassy bank, the potted plant can be lifted from its temporary perch on the sewing box to other positions around the room and is thus emblematic of the sisters’ uprooted existence. However, when Van Gogh discovered the engraving printed in one of his cherished old copies of The Graphic, which he bought secondhand while living in The Hague, he was struck by the “pure sentiment” of the work, which he saw as a lesson in gratitude. In a letter to his brother Theo in Paris, written in 1883, he noted that the gaunt and work-weary central figure “briefly smells a primrose on the table while picking up a white piece of needlework.”23 To the Dutch painter Anthon van Rappard he described the scented flower as standing out amid the sewing box and the surrounding heap of half-made garments like the “full warble of the nightingale on a spring night,” and the stooping sister as possessing the “largesse of soul” to appreciate “the sublime” amidst “ordinary commonplace things.”24 Potpourri The connection between ghosts, memory, and organic aromas permeated nineteenth-century art and literature. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), his most famous collection of essays, the American physician, poet, and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes drew on the conceit of dried flowers as preserving in scent memories not only of summers past but also of former lives, loves, hopes, and dreams. Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery [sic], as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied

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Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint, sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.25 The passage reverberates with the mid-Victorian fascination for Egyptology and the discovery of tombs and mummies that, when unwrapped (mummy unwrapping parties being all the rage in Victorian London), were found to be dusty and fragile, or hard from tar, and to unleash a piquant odor of spice and decay.26 The conceit of memories being preserved within dried herbs, leaves, flowers, spices, or fruits was rehearsed many times in the nineteenth century. Holmes wrote: “Ah me! What strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and penny-royal and lavender and mint and catnip. There apples were stored . . . there peaches lay in the dark. . . . The odorous echo of a score of dead summers linger yet in those dim recesses.”27 A similar sentiment lies behind a passage in the anonymous article “Flower Odors.” As with Autumn Leaves (see fig. 31), the melancholic tone reflects a mood of mourning, here, perhaps, due to the American Civil War: “Open a drawer and one starts, appalled at flower breaths, stifling, shut up long ago. The sprays themselves might drop unheeded down—dead with the young hopes that laid them there—but the old-time emotion wraps one yet in that undying—ah, how sickening!—fragrance.”28 Both passages evoke a metaphor of the apparatus of the memory as an aromatic cupboard or drawer. Underlying these cameos of country domesticity are the threads of degeneration theory. The old cupboard in the ancient house suggests not only the memory but the entire limbic system, an ancient part of the brain that supports memory and olfaction as well as primal emotions and behavior. Smell is the ghost sense, rattling around this ramshackle “house” in the brain, a relic of a primeval past, while the dried-up organic matter is reminiscent of reports of the decayed and archaic limbic fissure. George Dunlop Leslie’s Pot Pourri (1874) also draws on ideas about the scent of dried organic matter to suggest nostalgia, here presented as an Arcadian vision of eighteenth-century female domesticity (fig. 35). On the table, we see a large Chinese bowl filled with fresh rose petals. A twist of orris root and a few discarded sprigs of lavender on the floor indicate that the maid seated at the table has been crushing these with the pestle and mortar to release their scented oils. The standing figure (evidently the lady of the house) cups a sample in her hand and inhales; eyes closed, she appears absorbed in sensory pleasure. In contrast, the maid appears alert as she awaits approval for her handiwork.29 Behind her, the sash window is raised, and we see clearly through to the garden; we can imagine the fresh air and scent from it permeating the room. Along the edge of the garden, we see railings marking the perimeters of the property—a reminder of

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Fig. 35  George Dunlop Leslie, Pot Pourri, 1874. Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 99.1 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

the confines of female domestic life.30 Yet scent offers a form of mental escape. In contrast to the open window behind the maid, the window behind the lady is closed, and a linen blind is drawn. The blind acts as a screen through which we see the silhouette of the window mullions and the shadowy shapes of the rose leaves on the bush outside. Unable to see the leaves in all their color and detail, we have the sense that the lady’s thoughts reach past the here and now toward faded recollections of the past. Lost in scent, she has slid out of the present and, since she haunts another time, she has in a sense herself become a ghost. Intriguingly, images of potpourri-making were often set historically, such as in Potpourri (1899) by Edwin Austin Abbey, which depicts a scene from the late 1700s. Herbert Draper’s Pot Pourri of 1897 also treats the theme of dried flowers, scent, and memory (fig. 36). A brunette in a violet dress sits in silhouetted

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profile, head downcast, at a table littered with loose petals and red, pink, cream, and white rose heads. She twirls a rose stem, almost as if spinning yarn, so that the spiral of petals unravels, each falling loose in turn, prompted by the flicking action of her thumb, and dropping into the blue and white porcelain bowl on her lap. She seems lost in thought. Indeed, the soft focus of her hair and the diffuse halo it creates around her head evokes the idea of reverie by suggesting mental energy. This effect appears in other paintings of the period, including John William Godward’s Far Away Thoughts (1892) and The Scent (1890) by the Dutch painter Paul Rink. In the latter, the space between the profile of the girl’s face and the rose she smells remains unfinished, the canvas weave forming a swirl of pale brown haze, evoking fragrant air. The lack of narrative and the stillness of the scene, as well as the emphasis on the beauty of the girl, the roses, and the Chinese porcelain, place Draper’s Pot Pourri within the realm of Victorian Aestheticism. It might be considered alongside Millais’s Shelling Peas (1891), as well as earlier works such as Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864), Sandys’s Grace Rose (1866), and Moore’s Azaleas (1868), in which a woman in classical dress gathers blossoms in a bowl. Of Azaleas, Swinburne wrote: “its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be.”31 In Draper’s earlier painting In the Studio (1892), a girl idly arranges narcissus flowers in a porcelain bowl. The soft diffusion of shades of white paint creates a hazy effect, suggestive of a scent-inspired reverie; and yet the painting’s title and the inclusion of a stack of canvases propped against the model’s podium expose the staged nature of the scene. In Yvonne Draper, a later painting of 1912, Draper depicts his adult daughter stirring crisp dry petals, as if the act of stirring stimulates the pathways of memory back to the sentiments of youth. Millais painted Pot Pourri in 1856 (it was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 and 1886), and in writing of this work, art historian Paul Barlow has noted Millais’s “aesthetic fascination with pictorial artifice,” noting that the bowl is “decorated with stylised sprigs, while the lace on . . . [the girl’s] dress forms a lattice of stylised stalks.”32 In both Millais’s and Draper’s paintings, scent, suggested by the creation of potpourri, is integral to a vision of art for art’s sake. With its mood of nostalgia and lament, Draper’s Pot Pourri pays homage not only to Millais’s Pot Pourri but also to Autumn Leaves (see fig. 31). Youth, beauty, and fragrance are contrasted with death, decay, and the passage of time. Like the leaves in Millais’s bonfire scene, the petals suggest individual recollections—here memories of youth and summers past—retained in and revived by the perfume of the dried flowers. Yet, while the theme of making potpourri suggests preservation, Draper’s painting also hints at the corrosion of memory. To the right of the girl, a bunch of dried flowers or herbs, now crisp and brown, hangs from a rusty nail, left to dry and now seemingly forgotten—a mere trace of what it once was. The contrast of the fresh petals on the table and the dry

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Fig. 36  Herbert Draper, Pot Pourri, 1897. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 68.5 cm. Private collection. Photo © The Maas Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

flowers hanging from the nail evokes a sense of disjuncture between the hopes and dreams of youth and the loss and nostalgia of later life. Hanging against the wall, some of the plant matter has stuck there as it dried, and traces of it cling there still—an acknowledgment of fading memories and, perhaps, even a reference to the atrophy of the human sense of smell and of the limbic fissure. The sweeping hang of the dead plant echoes the curve of the girl’s head, appearing like a stain on the wall, adding a sense of morbidity and suggesting that her thoughts are “not all roses”: potentially a reference to the many perceived links between the sense of smell and female neuroses such as hysteria.33 In Pot Pourri, the roses handled by the young woman have yet to dry. They are fleshy in their squashy plumpness, and each petal has to be pried off the flower with precision. In the bottom right of the picture, the brushwork is loose, and the petals are suggested by smears of slick oil paint that evoke their freshness, as if they would ooze their fragrant oils when bruised. Both roses and loose petals

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are scattered across the table, leading an art critic for the Birmingham Post to bemoan the “abominable messes with which ladies love to poison the atmosphere of a drawing room.”34 Given this mess and the fleshy fragility of the petals, one wonders whether the work’s first owner, the physiologist and surgeon Clinton Thomas Dent, later president of the Surgical Section of the Royal Society, saw an affinity in the painting to an operating table. Dent wrote entries in Allbutt’s System of Medicine and Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892)—a volume that contained much on olfactory pathology and associated mental disorders—so in all likelihood he would have been familiar with the nebulous border between the physiology and pathology of smell and memory.35 A Whiff and a Flash Scents were perceived to stir the Victorian visual imagination, stimulating dreams and reveries, hauntings and hallucinations that enriched mental life. Scents bewitched the mind. They influenced dream imagery, roused the imagination, and reawakened dormant memories of past scenes or surroundings. They created instant shortcuts to distant ages and exotic lands and raised the specters of long-deceased loved ones. Perfumes were described as illumining the mind, lighting up memories, and sparking flashbacks. In short, scents inspired visions that both delighted and disturbed. “An orange-bud will carry us to Sorrento, a rose to Persia and the Paradise of the Houris. . . . A lady with a sandal-wood fan will diffuse around the room delicate dreams of Araby the Blest.” Thus mused the theosophist Cranch in his Putnam’s Monthly Magazine article of 1869 on the aesthetics and idiosyncrasies of smell.36 While Cranch appealed to an imagined or collective memory, the poet and physician Holmes, writing eleven years earlier, described the effect of scent on memory as idiosyncratic and highly personal: “I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another [sic], some of these things got mixed up with each other: orange-coloured fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening litmus-paper and blushing cheeks . . . Phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapours with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance.” The visionary potential of smell seemed startling with memories of early passion igniting in the mind, like sparks from a chemistry set. Holmes believed that the olfactory nerve was “not a ‘nerve’ at all, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.” Nevertheless, as later psychologists were to do in their studies of olfactory hallucination, he drew upon the directness of the sense of smell’s connection to the brain as a possible reason for the sudden, “strange” intensity of this effect.37 Smells, it seemed, surged and streaked through the mind, exciting the nerves with overwhelming force. As a writer for Harpers’ New Monthly Magazine

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explained in 1856, visual memories, impressed upon the mind in association with certain smells, could be revived with “striking, almost stunning suddenness and force . . . the very moment that similar odors affect our nerves. . . . The little fragrant atoms now affect precisely the same minute, delicate nerves that they once before, perhaps years ago, had touched; there a thousand forgotten but not effaced impressions have been slumbering ever since, and at the magic touch revive once more and cause us kindred sensations.”38 Like the burning strip of Papier d’Arménie that in Beaussart’s poster lights up the night in a flash of lurid yellow (see fig. 16), scent was imagined to act like a touch paper upon the nerves. The vivid “flash” of the scent-inspired vision was much rehearsed in nineteenth-century literature. For example, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1856) described the olfactory-induced flashbacks of a traveler whose nervous system had been overwrought by sensory impressions confronted in the East: “The sweet fragrance of cypress-wood is full of richest recollections of the fragrant Orient, and the faint perfume of the rose of Damascus paints with the lightning’s flashing light the brilliant bazaar and the distant Houran on our mind’s eye.”39 Flashes of odor-cued memory signaled mental disturbance in Victorian literature, as in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), in which the protagonist, Feverel, stands outside Lucy’s house in the darkness, willing her to be home. The intense scent of late jasmine prompts memories of her in “the dear old house, doing her sweet household duties” to flash “before his eyes”; it excites “blood and brain” and acts as the catalyst for his descent into insanity.40 This notion of “flash” echoes early explorations into flash photography, the technical vocabulary of which, as Flint has shown, left its impression upon the language of memory and human perception from the mid-nineteenth century onward.41 Just as the photographer’s flashbulb exploded suddenly and intrusively, lighting up caves, catacombs, slums, or morgues and illuminating what would otherwise remain shrouded in darkness, smells reignited memories with shocking intensity. Opium Vision In Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864–70), a flash of divine light from the heavens illuminates the background of this visionary oil on canvas (fig. 37). At the same time, however, the parallel with contemporary camera flash that the painting evokes may then remind us of Victorian photography in other ways, including the rising sentimental importance of portrait photography and the uncanny effects of spirit photography. The painting pays homage to the memory of Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddall, whose death from a laudanum overdose on February 11, 1862, prompted the artist’s interest and participation in spiritualist séances.42 It also responds to Dante Alighieri’s account of his unrequited love and mourning

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Fig. 37  Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–70. Oil on canvas, unframed dimensions 86.4 × 66 cm. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

for Beatrice Portinari in La vita nuova (1295). Beatrice (with Siddall’s features) is depicted with upturned face, eyes closed, and a glowing aureole of golden light haloing her head. In the background, dimly suggested, are the outlines of a cityscape and the spectral figures of Love and Death.43 In the foreground, a red dove of love bears a white poppy in its beak, the dove referencing Rossetti’s affectionate name for Siddall, and the poppy referencing the sleep of death and, we

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might assume, the opiate that caused Siddall’s death. Here the flash of supernatural light suggests two ideas: first, that we are witnessing Beatrice in the throes of a vision, and second, that this is a painting of her as a vision. Rossetti and Siddall’s friend Swinburne described the picture as depicting Beatrice with “fast-shut eyes in a death-like trance that is not death.”44 In 1871, Rossetti wrote to the picture’s first owner, the Honorable Mrs. Cowper-Temple, that he had depicted “Beatrice seated at the balcony over-looking the city . . . suddenly rapt from Earth to Heaven. . . . She sees through her shut eyes. . . .”45 Moreover, as art historians Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone have observed, the hazy, unfocused quality of the picture “creates a visionary, dream-like, transcendent character” that may reference opium, suggesting “a membrane through which the parallel, anti-materialist world of the imagination or the ideal can be glimpsed, as if through frosted glass.”46 While this diffuseness in Beata Beatrix enhances the sense of a revelation and a glimpse into the afterlife, it also suggests a drug-addled haze and an atmosphere pregnant with the scent of laudanum—the taste of which is so bitter that in the 1850s it was flavored with cloves, cinnamon, and saffron. In his article “Scent Memories” of 1863, the Reverend Jacox described his horror of the smell of ether (inhaled as an anaesthetic), which for him recalled painful memories of visiting the sick and performing last rites. He empathized with the East Anglian curate and physician the Reverend Dr. Charles David Badham, whom he quotes: “That which is daily applied to the moribund nostrils of hundreds, that death-bed drug, the overpowering ether, which, escaping from the narrowest chink in a phial, comes fitfully, coldly, clammily, as a breath escaped from the charnel-house, to force upon our memory many a scene of sorrow where we have inhaled it, in presence of the last struggles of the departing, and amid the sobs, wailings and faintings of the bereaved—we recoil with detestation and loathing.”47 Like ether, laudanum would have been a familiar smell of the sickroom and the deathbed because, despite being toxic and addictive, it was widely dispensed for its supposed cure-all medicinal properties.48 The Smell of Ghosts From the 1860s onward, popular ideas about the power of scent to deluge the mind with memories of the dead had fused both with the Victorian cult of mourning and with the popular fascination with spiritualism. In the séances of the mid-nineteenth century, spirits sometimes manifested themselves as fragrances (the spirits of flowers). In his autobiography, Incidents in My Life (1863), the notorious medium Daniel Dunglas Home drew attention to reports of “spirit smells” endowing the “unseen world” with a detectable, if ephemeral, olfactory presence. Drawing on the testimony of a London barrister, Home reported how, at one séance, the aromas of attar of roses, millefleurs, and lavender water wafted

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across the room.49 The most aromatic of séances, however, were those presided over by William Stainton Moses in the 1870s. Replete with levitations, spirit writings, strange lights, and ghostly music, the meetings of the future president of the London Spiritualist Alliance never failed to deliver. Two decades later, Frederic W. H. Myers, a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, recalled how the scents of musk, verbena, and new-mown hay had been produced in abundance on these occasions and were thought to be delivered by angels: “They [the angels] fanned us with perfumed air as soon as we sat down, and rained wet scent over us, which they made from some sweetbriar we had in the room. We were deluged with this most fragrant perfume; it fell all over my face, arms, and hands; it was poured over each member of the circle, and into our hands on request.”50 Scents came in various ways; sometimes breezes heavy with perfume swept around the room; at other times, essences sprinkled from the ceiling in gentle showers or streamed over the participants’ hands as if poured from a jug. The fragrance of verbena was even said to have oozed from Moses’s scalp, proliferating and intensifying when wiped away. Bombarded with fragrance, sitters were enraptured.51 Like Rossetti, many hoped for contact with lost loved ones. Smell and Grief Smell could bring a heightened sensory acuteness to both verbal and visual accounts of grieving. For example, an 1885 portrait by the Italian painter Silvestro Lega shows Eleonora Tommasi (a cousin of Lega’s friend, artist Adolfo Tommasi) depicted in full mourning, her eyes closed and her face taut with grief (fig. 38). Lega was a leading member of the Macchiaioli movement whose members, like the Pre-Raphaelites, challenged the conventions of academic art by taking inspiration from early Renaissance art. They sought to bridge the gap between Italian greatness, past and present, and to create a new expressive style for a unified and progressive modern Italy.52 Here Eleonora holds a bouquet of flowers close to her body; her concentration is fixed on their scent and the memories they raise, while a stamen brushes against her nostril, emphasizing the suggestion of smell and smelling. The broad brushstrokes of the flowers and the sketchy quality of this Impressionist painting (which may in part be due to the artist’s near blindness by this date) convey the blurred vision of a person locked in grief. The figure’s face is set in profile against a dark green hedge—likely the same hedge in the garden of the Tommasi family villa on the Arno at Bellariva, near Florence, against which Lega had painted an earlier portrait of the sitter. It evokes the plain block-colored backgrounds of Renaissance portraits, a format previously adopted by the Pre-Raphaelites (whom the Macchiaioli greatly admired) in works such as Sandys’s Mary Magdalene (ca. 1859). Due to the poignancy of memory during bereavement, olfactory reminiscences became a literary convention. An article of 1898 by Samuel Warns, a

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Fig. 38  Silvestro Lega, Eleonora Tommasi, 1885. Oil on canvas, 48 × 40 cm. Private collection. Photo © A. Dagli Orti / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.

writer for the popular American literary journal Lippincott’s Magazine, describes odors as “sentient with life,” noting that “from childhood to maturity and old age they mark the stages of our passage through life with the same unerring certainty that the hands on the clock tell the hours. All our sorrows and joys, failures and successes, are marked with some distinctive odor.”53 Referring to the scent of flowers scattered upon a coffin, he wrote: “Tuberoses take us back again to the scene of our childhood, to the little church with straight-backed benches and uncushioned seats, where our mother took us as children. She is here again

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with us today, but it is for the last time, and as we see the cloth-covered coffin, borne reverently by loving hands, and look upon the peaceful face within . . . we feel as though our hearts should break.”54 This sense of the melancholy of life’s progression had infused Millais’s Autumn Leaves (see fig. 31). As Rosenfeld writes of the painting, “the smell of leaves recalls both a resonant olfactory memory from the past and the awareness of seasonal circularity, that this moment will not come again, although the sensations will be revisited year after year.”55 Haunting Aromas For the novelist Vernon Lee, a close friend of Sargent’s, the sixth sense could best be likened to the elusive sense of smell. “A genuine ghost story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories, those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of the supernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange perfume of witchgarden flowers,” she declared in the introduction to Hauntings, a collection of tales published in 1890, in which she accounted for ghosts as the product of the grieving mind.56 Unseen and intangible, scents, like ghosts, signified an almost unknowable presence hanging in the air, altering moods and swaying emotions. For Lee, the perceived affinity between scent and the supernatural had its roots in the mechanism of the memory and the mind. She writes: “They [ghosts] are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicating, heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flame of candle and fire start up once more after waning.”57 For Lee, both memories and ghosts are like dead leaves or husks, lacking their former substance but retaining through scent a lingering yet disconcertingly different suggestion of their former presence. Here again, the description bears the hint of a suggestion of the decayed olfactory lobe. Lee was fascinated by psychology, devising her own theory of physiological aesthetics in collaboration with her partner, Kit Anstruther-Thomson. Drawing upon the work of her friend William James and other leading psychologists, they argued that spectators “empathize” with works of art, and that this is demonstrated when artworks trigger memories or emotions or cause changes to breathing, heart rate, posture, or mood. In connecting ghosts and memories as traces of former lives and lived experiences, Lee responds creatively to the pioneering field of memory science. Hauntings came just five years after the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus observed that “sensations, feelings, ideas” are not “utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they continue to exist, stored up, so to speak, in the memory.”58 It also evokes

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something of James’s work on memory in Principles of Psychology (1890), in which he describes how some thoughts may “fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion” while others “leave vestiges which are indestructible and by means of which may be recalled as long as life endures.”59 The connection between the science of psychology and spiritualist investigation was two-way. James, a founding member and vice president of the American Society for Psychical Research, became engaged with the study of the paranormal and was drawn to Lee’s ghost writings after the death of his infant son in 1884. Violet Telepathy By the early twentieth century, it was popular to imagine smell as a pathway beyond death into the “after life.”60 In 1907, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research reported on olfaction as a vehicle for telepathic communication between the dead and the living. A “sensitive,” that is, a person receptive to supernatural phenomena, might become alert to a ghostly presence via the sense of smell. In a letter to the editor, a bereaved mother described how her dying son had spoken of his love of violets. A few months later, she was alone in her room sewing when “all at once, first a faint and then a very pronounced odor of violets filled the room—there certainly were no violets anywhere; it was not the season to have them around—what was it—Charlie is here, something said within me.” “Since we could not see him,” the mother concluded, “this was surely a beautiful way for him to impress us with his presence.”61 Despite the ubiquity of violet perfume in this period, including the cheap mail-order products of Sears, Colgate, and the California Perfume Company, it maintained an ethereal otherworldliness. Ionone, the aroma compound used to create artificial violet perfumes, desensitizes and short-circuits the nose, switching off our olfactory receptors, making us “nose blind” for a few moments, so that the scent fades in and out of our consciousness: a perfect parallel for ghostly apparitions.62 By indicating supernatural presences and invoking the flash of visual hallucination, smells bridged the known range of human sensory experience and transcendental realms. In his short story “The Perfume of Egypt” (1911), the theosophist and clairvoyant Charles Webster Leadbeater merged ideas about smell, ghosts, and the flash of the olfactory imagination. In this story, an Oxford student working late in his study is disturbed by the sense that he is not alone. He glances around but there is nothing to be seen. Gradually, however, a presence manifests itself as the faint waftings of “subtle perfume of ancient eastern magic!” As the “strange, sweet Oriental perfume” intensifies, an apparition takes form. “A stronger whiff than ever greeted my nostrils, and at the same time a slight rustle caused me to raise my eyes from my book. Judge of my astonishment when I saw, not five yards from me, seated at the table . . . the figure of a man! Even as I looked at him the pen fell from his hand, he rose from the chair,

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threw upon me a glance which seemed to express bitter disappointment and heart-rending appeal, and—vanished!” Throughout the narrator’s account of the haunting, vision and smell are the key senses called upon. He stares at the spot where the figure had stood and “rubs his eyes mechanically,” as though to “clear away the relics of some horrible dream.” As “the strange magical odour fades,” it “flashes” upon him that “the haunting sense of an unseen presence” has gone. Though the apparition comes in a “startling light,” its absence gives him a “sense of freedom such as a man feels when he steps out of some dark dungeon into the full bright sunlight.”63 Leadbeater was well aware of the spiritual interest in scent, having witnessed the use of oriental perfumes in the séances of his mentor, the renowned medium and psychic Madame Blavatsky, and he also conducted investigations into the sense of smell with Besant as part of their joint research into occult chemistry.64 Advertising and Perfumed Reverie By the 1890s, the idea of scent inspiring memories or visions even held popular commercial appeal. In an 1898 advertisement for Lundborg’s 1889 perfume Heather of the Links (fig. 39), “a subtle, delicate fragrance that recalls to memory the land of the heather-fringed links,” a tartan-clad golfer materializes out of vapors issuing from a scent bottle. A spirit presence on the threshold of visual manifestation, she evokes both the vision that the perfume inspires and the personification of the perfume itself. The subtle evocativeness of the perfume is offered as a concrete promise; in her thick dark tweeds, tartan cape, and beret, she appears as real and tangible as the perfume bottle that casts its shadow upon its box. This fresh mountain fragrance, or rather “this perfect semblance of nature’s sweetest flowers,” encapsulates the spirit of an ideal of the Scottish Highlands with bracing, wholesome air and hale-and-hearty women. At a time when, as Classen has argued, sensory experiences (whether a song, an image, a dance, or a dish) were increasingly promoted as symbols of national identity, the New York–based international perfume house was trading on the scent of a nation, to Scots around the world and to “armchair travelers” who would wear it with pleasure or pride.65 If Heather of the Links encapsulated a Scottish ideal, the perfume Shemel-Nessim evoked a fantasy vision of the “scent of Araby.” A poster by Thomas Maybank for the London perfume house Grossmith, dating from ca. 1906, depicts a girl sleeping in imagined harem attire, her dreams apparently influenced by the spray of pink, mauve, and yellowy fumes pervading the room from the oversized and unstoppered perfume bottle at her side (fig. 40). Cherubs and fairies scattering flowers are borne on these fragrant jets. Taking its name from the Egyptian festival of springtime that translates as “inhaling the breeze,” Shemel-Nessim was one of a family of perfumes produced by Grossmith that included

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Fig. 39  Advertisement for Lundborg’s Heather of the Links, published in McClure’s Magazine 6 (1898): 153. Collection of Christina Bradstreet.

Hasu-No-Hana (1888) and Phul-Nana (1891). Known as “Orientals,” these scents had little to do with Middle Eastern and North African perfume and everything to do with the Western vogue for an imagined exotic “Orient,” as suggested by the poster’s description of “a dream of a fragrance, exquisitely suggestive of oriental luxury.” It reflects nineteenth-century Western ideas about the perceived Eastern proclivity for intoxicating perfume, which were annexed to ideas about industrial and economic backwardness. In The Book of Perfumes (1865), Rimmel observed that “oriental” women “love to be in an atmosphere redolent with fragrant odours that keep them in a state of dreamy languor which is for them the nearest approach to happiness.” He believed that in the Orient, perfume consumption was “principally cultivated among ladies who, caring little or nothing for mental acquirements, and debarred from the pleasures of society, are driven to resort to such sensual enjoyments as their secluded mode of life will afford.”66 An accompanying illustration depicted a harem beauty whiling away the hours by inhaling the scent from a rose, her perfume flaçons and decanters

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Fig. 40  Thomas Maybank, poster for Grossmith’s Shemel-Nessim, ca. 1906. Photo: Grossmith.

at her side.67 While etiquette aligned modest English ladies with simple florals, these perfumes supplied a growing demand for stronger and more sultry scents, associated in the popular imagination with Eastern women.68 With its mysterious and complex formula, combining orris (iris root) with top notes of bergamot, neroli, geranium, rose, jasmine, and ylang-ylang laid over sweet vanilla, musk, heliotrope, and cedarwood, Shem-el-Nessim tapped into an exotic fantasy of Oriental indulgence, far removed from its real origins in Western manufacture. Scent, Psychology, and Decadence Scent-inspired dreams became a popular theme within visual ephemera. One such example, a French song sheet cover illustrated by V. Gardien for a “Chansons

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Fig. 41  Song sheet cover illustrated by V. Gardien, ca. 1895, for a “Chansons Humaines” by Xavier Privas and C. Tristan called “Thuriféreaires.” Photo © Mary Evans Picture Library.

Humaines” by Xavier Privas and C. Tristan titled “Thuriféreaires” (Incense Burners; ca. 1895), suggests the macabre power of incense to prompt nightmares (fig. 41). The dramatic image depicts smoke spiraling from an incense burner, from which dreadful creatures cascade, including a ghoul preying on a female corpse, a macabre clown, and an old man filching a casket. Around the turn of the century, experimental psychologists became interested in testing the effects of scent upon dream imagery and memory. In 1899, the American educational psychologist Will Seymour Monroe launched an investigation in the American Journal of Psychology into the efficacy of sensory stimuli for influencing the nature and flow of mental imagery. In one experiment, female participants were asked to chew a clove before bed and, on waking, to record their dreams. One participant reported dreaming of “smelling and seeing spices,” while another dreamed of sketching cowslips and inhaling their fragrance. A third participant dreamed of modeling Asia out of sand, from which some “sweet-smelling peas” sprang up.69 Scent, it seemed, did indeed have a powerful effect upon dream imagery.

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This research was followed by that of Alice Heywood and Helen Vortriede at Vassar College in New York, who in 1905 undertook experiments to test the influence of smell upon the memory, concluding that the “power of smells to revive association is due largely to the conditions which favour attention to them in everyday life.” The scent of a box hedge, they suggested, might trigger memories of childhood, because of the singularity of the smell.70 In an experiment overseen in 1907 by Edward Titchener, head of Psychology at Cornell University, balls of perfume-soaked cotton wool were stuck to the backs of fifty different picture postcards, so that each postcard was assigned a distinct scent. After gazing at each postcard for ten or fifteen seconds, the participants were invited to describe the imagery that came to mind when presented with just the scent.71 This time, however, the results were inconclusive. Unsurprisingly, gendered ideas about the olfactory imagination, as established by Galton and others, influenced this field of research. In his 1908 article “On the Associative Power of Odors,” J. Harris wrote of an experiment in which a female artist had experienced countless visions on being presented with different odors, while a distinguished man of science encountered none.72 Marcel Proust’s extraordinarily evocative passages on the psychology of smell were in gestation during this period of pioneering experiments into involuntary memory. The most celebrated account of the power of scent for recalling vivid memories is, of course, the episode in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913– 1927) in which the sudden conjunction of the scent and flavors of madeleine cake dipped in lime-flower tea revives long-forgotten childhood memories. Marcel, the narrator, describes memories of breakfasting in his aunt Léonie’s bedroom on Sunday mornings. With a rush of elation, visions spring up from the taste and scent of the pastry crumbs soaked in tilleul, a lime-scented infusion made from linden blossoms: “the old grey house on the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set . . . the entire town, with its people and houses, gardens, church, and surroundings, taking shape and solidity.”73 Yet, as literary historian Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and her neuroscientist father Gordon M. Shepherd have argued, memories of the village of Combray do not “spring full-fledged and at once from the teacup” or “leap out at him in an instantaneous panorama.” Rather, they emerge first as a vague feeling of an elusive memory, slipping beyond reach.74 It takes tremendous effort to induce the memory to take tangible form, and Proust documents the stages, distinguishing between involuntary and voluntary memory. The scene begins with Marcel in a dispirited state of mind. Drinking the tea prompts a surge of elation, an overwhelming feeling of pleasure and happiness. Only after several minutes of mental probing and experimental effort does he suddenly arrive at a memory associated with the sensation: no less than the whole of his childhood in Combray. I began again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state . . . I decide to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the

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moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same state . . . I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation . . . I shut out every obstacle . . . I compel it . . . I feel something start within me . . . ; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly . . . Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind . . . Ten times over I must essay the task . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself.75 The sequence, as Shepherd and Shepherd-Barr explain, is “sensory stimulus, strong emotion, active introspection/search, and sudden and complete recall.”76 Repeated tastings of tea and madeleine only diminish the effect. This experience, however, launches Marcel’s quest to resurrect memories of Combray, setting in motion the chain of events that follow. Proust reinvented what had become a banal, sentimental trope—the employment of smell as a literary device for bridging the past and the present, and plot structures in which relationships are traced through the course of a lifetime through olfactory reminiscence.77 Today, odor-cued memory, whether as a plot device or lived experience, is known as “the Proust phenomenon.” Neurology and Degeneration Nineteenth-century scientists did not identify a direct neurological relationship between the brain structures serving smell and creativity. Rather, a connection was acknowledged in a general way. It was commonly held that odor-cued memories were so poignant because they were generated within the area of the rhinencephalon, or “smell brain,” which, as we have seen, was understood to be the most primitive part of the mind, associated with primal emotions rather than civilized intellect. The neuroscientist Broca’s assertion that the rhinencephalon was an almost defunct and indeed decaying primeval relic, located in an ancient and almost redundant area of the anterior of the brain, remote from the cerebral seats of reason, reverberated through popular writings and influenced perceptions of the olfactory imagination up to the turn of the century.78 As demonstrated in the previous chapter, mental health specialists often regarded olfactory hallucinations and visions inspired by smells as the by-product of lesions and tumors, yet at the same time others began to relate the olfactory imagination to degenerative disorders of the sense of smell; for many, it was a repugnant legacy of Homo sapiens’s animalistic past. In his vitriolic attack upon fin-de-siècle aesthetic modernity, Nordau denounced smell in art and literature as a sign of atavism borne of the degeneration of the olfactory lobe. Given the supposedly dilapidated condition of the human rhinencephalon and its remoteness from the intellectual faculties, the

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capacity for smell to engender complex mental imagery was a matter of perplexity. In Degeneration (German 1892, English 1895), Nordau argued that it was impossible for the sense of smell to facilitate thought, because the evolutionary decline of the human olfactory lobe and the rhinencephalon was too far advanced. Odors, he claimed, could only stimulate man with ideas and associations “in the most limited degree.” “In order to inspire a man with logical sequences of ideas and judgements, with abstract concepts by scents alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, his frontal lobe must be depressed and the lobe of a dog substituted for it.”79 Drawing upon Broca’s research on comparative studies of the olfactory lobe in different animals and races lent scientific authority to Nordau’s denouncement of Zola and Huysmans. He described the olfactory writings of the latter as “literary canal-dredging” and responded with vitriol to the paintings of Eugène Carrière, which he described as “suffused in a problematic vapour, reeking as it were with a cloud of incense.”80 For Nordau, this French commitment to the olfactory sense was nothing less than barbaric and atavistic. Nordau’s comments target Huysmans’s writings in particular; passages in his texts invoke the startling effect of smell upon the imagination, just as Nordau described. Published as part of Parisian Sketches, a collection of literary impressions of Parisian life in all its odors, Huysmans’s “Resemblances” of 1880 illustrates the evocativeness of scent for inspiring “sequences of ideas,” here presented as the visual imagery of the mind’s eye. The essay captures the mood of sensual excess that permeated Decadent writings on perfume and memory in the 1890s. As the protagonist (a prototype of Des Esseintes) sets out to master the craft of perfumery, he records the visions conjured in his mind’s eye by the scents, a by-product of the creative and production processes. First of all there were vague sensations of warmth, faint vapours of heliotrope and iris, of verbena and reseda, which filled me with the strangely plaintive charm of cloudy autumn skies . . . and women with indistinct faces and vague outlines, with ash-blond hair, with the bluish pink complexion of hydrangeas, with skirts iridescent with fading glimmers, came forward . . . Then the vision disappeared, and a delicate scent of bergamot and frangipane, of moss rose and chypre, of maréchal and new-mown hay, sprang out, trim and fresh-looking, with snow-powdered hair, caressing mischievous eyes and blue and peach-blossom frills and flounces, then gradually faded away and disappeared completely.81 Described by the Academy in July 1880 as “sometimes crude to banality, sometimes refined to enervation,” Huysmans’s “Resemblances” recounts a dream of perfumes from which ghostly female apparitions emerge.82

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This short literary sketch paved the way for the scene in Against Nature (1884) where Des Esseintes turns to nasal homeopathy, sucking fragrant bonbons impregnated with the sensual odors of past lovers in a vain attempt to cure the olfactory delusions that plague him. The flavor and fragrance of the sweets “tear aside the veils of memory” and project “urgent, corporeal reality.” Their taste and scent vivify the “parade of mistresses” trooping across his field of memory. Later, perfumes transport him to the past so that a memory is resurrected before him “with extraordinary vividness,” becoming an image in the mirror.83 The sweets trigger a chain of visions linked to the debaucheries of his youth, the implication being that his olfactory imagination is symptomatic of syphilis; the disease is also indicated by his collection of orchids spotted with rash-like marks.84 His olfactory neurosis is accompanied by further visual hallucinations, as fleshy “Boucher’s Venuses” seem to install themselves upon the walls of his boudoir.85 Only a few years later, visions inspired by scent were categorized as symptoms of pathological disorder alongside olfactory hallucinations. In an article about the effects of sensory stimuli on hallucination, a writer for the American Journal of Insanity in 1891 described the case of a “hysteric-epileptic” for whom smells revived visual images with such clarity that she was transported into a visionary world: “The smell of cologne water made her imagine that she was in a flower garden.”86 While Nordau’s condemnation of Huysmans’s writings was extreme, ideas around perfume, decadence, and pathology were latent in much late nineteenth-century discourse on the olfactory imagination. Just as looking at an image and having an olfactory experience was deemed a normal physiological experience, unless too keenly felt or believed in, so memories and visions inspired by smell were perceived to be a natural (if melancholic) response, unless taken to an unhealthy excess. If certain perfumes and the release of odors from leaf mulch, dried herbs and flowers, and other organic matter were thought to induce morbid memories and hallucinations, it was also commonly held that the olfactory imagination was itself borne of mental decay. Ghosts occupied the borderlands between the healthy and the disturbed imagination. They were memory relics or traces of the past, revived and reformed by the imagination into new visionary constructs; they lay on the cusp between the natural remembrance of faces from the past and disturbing hallucinatory apparitions.

Chapter 6

Scent and Soul

No sense is more closely connected with the sphere of the soul than the sense of smell. —The Rev. Hugh Macmillan, The Ministry of Nature, 1871

Scents played a significant role not only in Victorian spiritualism but also in Christian spiritual life. Omnipresent yet elusive, ethereal yet almost palpable, smells convey a sense of the mysterious presence and absence of God and transcend language, like religious experience itself.1 Christians have associated smell with the life force breathed into Adam by God, deeming it a source of divine love, as well as a metaphor for the soul itself.2 The nose, in turn, has been conceived not only as a conduit for external information to impress upon the mind but also as a gateway to the soul.3 Smells radiate from the heart of matter, so are perceived as an intrinsic essence, conveying inner truths—truths that must be breathed in to be revealed. For this reason, smells are associated with interiority and, since “the nose knows,” they are seen as a fitting vehicle for expressing concepts of wisdom and divinity. Indeed, the word “sagacity” refers both to wisdom and a keen sense of smell. What better way to commune with The Almighty than by conveying prayers to heaven on the fumes of incense— fumes that create an atmosphere of sacredness and connect a congregation in holy union through the breath? For ancient and medieval Christians, heaven was ambrosial and scents heralded divine presence: angels were sweetly fragranced, Christ’s word was the perfumed breath of the panther, and dead saints emitted the odor of sanctity, a supernatural fragrance believed to radiate from virtuous individuals as a sign of divine grace.4 Meanwhile, hell reeked of sulfur and stench warned of evil, with demons belching stinks and puffing foul smoke from their nostrils.5 The

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legacy of many such ideas can be traced in nineteenth-century culture, as demonstrated by the perfumed panther in Moreau’s Salome (see fig. 18), the fragrant “angels” sensed at Moses’s séances, and the cleansing, aromatic strips of Papier d’Arménie that ward off miasma ghouls in Beaussart’s poster (see fig. 16). When Saint Thérèse of Lisieux died in 1897, her fellow Carmelite nuns reported that her corpse emanated a scent of roses that lingered for days, just as her namesake Saint Teresa of Ávila had in 1582—though by now the medical profession suspected diabetes. This association of scent and the spiritual lingered on even in the language of science. For example, in Les odeurs du corps humain (1886), the French physician Ernest Monin described smell’s role in medical diagnostics as the “the subtle soul of clinical instruction.”6 Also, in the 1880s, Gustav Jaeger (founder of the textiles brand) was dubbed the “the soul sniffer” for his studies into the effects of odor on the nervous system, while in 1903, the perfumer John Lipscomb Grossmith presented himself as the “custodian of the garnered souls of innumerable myriads of flowers” in an article for Stead’s Review of Reviews, in which perfumery is described as if it were a form of spiritualism.7 Despite a surge in the study of osphresiology in the second half of the nineteenth century, the physiology of olfaction remained a source of wonder, intensifying its validity as a metaphor for divine presence in an age when the secrets of the universe were increasingly resolved. Smells, it seemed, “moved in mysterious ways,” like the Lord himself. As an “intercourse betwixt mind and matter,” olfaction was “mysterious, and, probably, inexplicable,” according to John Bell, the Scottish anatomist, in his anatomy textbook, first published in 1797.8 Little advance had been made by the mid-nineteenth century. Comparing the mechanics of olfaction to the daguerreotype, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1856 supposed that “the fine particles of odor affect the delicate cilia and the skin underneath, in a manner as mysterious as the influence of light on the Daguerreian silver-plate.” Of all the senses, the writer observed: “None is less known and more neglected than that of smell. The very manner in which it performs its marvellous duties is a mystery; the thousand sources of pure, exquisite enjoyment that it affords us daily, are carelessly overlooked.”9 Even as late as 1905 (and despite the molecular research of Schultze and Liégois in the 1860s and 1870s), Henry Havelock Ellis observed in Studies in the Psychology of Sex that “the most fundamental principles of olfactory physiology and psychology are still somewhat vague and uncertain.”10 That same year, the English horticulturalist Burbidge suggested that no one knew precisely what smell was: “Even the smallest known insect can be caught in a microscope and made to give up the secret of its organisation, but what it is that the warm summer brings us from the wild flowers of the hillside or wafts to us from the choice exotics of the hothouse, no man has been able to determine.” Describing smell as “so fine, so subtle, so imponderable it eludes weights and measures,” he invoked the eighteenth-century language of spiritus rector or

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“aroma theory.”11 This theory, as summarized by the French olfactory scientist Hippolyte Cloquet in 1821, had defined smell as a “subtle fluid,” and as “volatile, being very fleeting, very expansible,” “weightless,” and “completely invisible and inaccessible to the senses, were it not for the olfactory membrane.”12 Intangible and ineffable, fragrance was the perfect metaphor to evoke the numinous presence of God or to announce supernatural phenomena. As Marina Warner has argued in Phantasmagoria (2006), the semiotics of air—including clouds, ether, gas, mist, smog, smoke, steam, wind, and vapor—offer a “magical passkey to the labyrinth of unknowable mysteries, outer and inner.”13 But perhaps more than any of these, smell was imagined to provide a conduit or pseudo-magical portal between the external world and the inner self, between heaven and earth and the living and spirit worlds. As the Reverend Hugh Macmillan, a Presbyterian minister of the Free Church of Scotland and prolific writer on the relationship between God and nature explained in The Ministry of Nature (1871), smell is “an unexplored avenue” to the soul. By “a process too enchanting to examine,” it “reaches more directly and excites more powerfully the emotional nature than either sight or hearing . . . leading at once . . . into the ideal world . . . [and] going down to the very depths of our nature.”14 The Blind Girl Millais’s painting The Blind Girl (1854–56) is a painting about sight, blindness, and spiritual vision (fig. 42). The painting depicts a blind girl and a younger, ablesighted child resting by a wayside. The focal point of the painting is the blind girl’s face, with her brilliant red lips and closed eyes, lit up by the sunlight. The closed eyes of a blind girl act as a familiar trope for signaling meditation upon, or curiosity and wonder toward, nonvisual sensations, to which the blind were said to have greater sensitivity. Here the girl’s quiet stillness suggests a heightened alertness to the scents and sounds that we imagine coming from the meadow, as well as, as Flint has suggested, a rapt attention to an inward spiritual vision.15 The painting thus reinforces the popular association of scent, closed eyes, and femininity with themes of irrationality. In contrast, the younger girl has twisted around and appears to gaze up and across to the double rainbow arching across the sky, while nestling back against her sister for refuge, as if amazed by and apprehensive of this sublime spectacle. There is a clear contrast between the blind and able-sighted girls (who are usually interpreted as sisters), as well as a contrast between the blind girl and the viewer. When Millais first exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1856, critics were startled by the minute observation of nature and the luminosity of the painting. Unaccustomed to the jewel-like radiance of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, a critic writing for the Athenaeum remarked on the “sweetmeat rainbow of lollypop colors.”16 Half a century later, in 1899, the artist’s son John Guille

Fig. 42  John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl, 1854–56. Oil on canvas, 80.8 × 53.4 cm. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0.

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Millais observed that “sunlight seems to issue from the picture.”17 This intensity serves as a reminder that, in contrast to the blind girl, who cannot see the colors of the rainbow, the viewer is privileged to enjoy the bright colors and laborious details of the painting and to appreciate Millais’s skill, even as he began to move away from the precision painting of early Pre-Raphaelitism. At the same time, the blind girl, imagined as alive within the landscape of the painting, enjoys the scents, sounds, and tactile sensations that the viewer is excluded from. The artist’s limits in conveying both the sensorial and the numinous may well have been on Millais’s mind. According to a reminiscence retold by his son, while staying in Winchelsea to paint the background, Millais and the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray attended a church service in which an elderly clergyman sermonized on the superiority of God’s work over the achievements of humankind. Leaning over the pulpit with arms outstretched and eyes fixed on Millais, he cried out repeatedly, “Can you paint that? Can you paint that?” before closing in solemn tones, “No, my brethren, he cannot paint that,” until the two friends were “almost hysterical in the effort to suppress their laughter.”18 Art historians have noted the visualization of the senses in the painting. Touch is implied by the gentleness of the blind girl’s fingers as she draws them along the fragile stem of a harebell, as well as by the contrast of the damp earth upon which the girls sit and the warmth of the sunlight in which a butterfly basks. Scent is suggested by the flowers and country air, while sound is signaled by the rooks, which we imagine cawing.19 Millais attempts to evoke God’s presence through the visualization of these sensory experiences. Yet the concertina, a prominent symbol of sound in the painting, is silent—unplayed—on the girl’s lap, once again hinting at the redundancy of the visual for evoking the multisensory world, despite Millais’s growing interest in synesthesia (which would not be named until the 1890s). Along the horizon line of the painting, we see depicted the outskirts of the fortified town of Winchelsea in Sussex and, at the center, at the rainbow’s end, the early fourteenth-century Strand Gate, part of the medieval city wall. Hitherto art historians have not remarked upon this as a symbolic indication of the senses. It links to the old metaphor of the mind as a medieval fortified city that was rehearsed in physiology texts such as Griffin’s The Christian Physiologist (1830) and Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life (1859), the latter stating, “our senses are the sentinels which guard us against the approach of danger.”20 George Sexton later argued in The Physiology of the Five Senses (1869) that the senses are “the outlets by means of which the mind goes out . . . into the external world, and the inlets by which the elements of the external world enter and impress the soul.”21 Therefore, we might think of the Strand Gate in Millais’s painting as demarcating not only the boundaries of town and country, but also the blind girl’s remaining senses, the gates between her inner self and the external world she inhabits.

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When Dickens met Laura Bridgman during his 1842 tour of America, perhaps influenced by Condillac, he imagined the girl, who was blind, deaf, and without the senses of smell and taste, as a statue, her psyche entombed within impenetrable marble, with just touch anchoring her to the world. Millais, in contrast, focuses on the enriching influence of the blind girl’s remaining senses. The “goodness” that she radiates is the beauty of God’s landscape, channeled through her senses. The scents and sounds of the pasture stream into her, shaping her thoughts and emotions, her attention in turn focusing the viewer’s awareness upon God’s creation as presented by the artist. Heaven and Earth In the painting, nature is depicted as bountiful: the grass is lush and, on the bank, a few harebell flowers. Yet Millais also suggests an element of harshness in nature. The ground on which the two figures sit appears damp, the track muddy, and in the pasture, rooks scavenge, and cows and donkeys—beasts of burden—graze. The rainbow that shines against dark storm clouds accentuates this conjunction of the radiant and the bleak, as does the blind girl who, with her glowing skin and glossy hair, appears to radiate health and innate purity despite her tattered linsey-woolsey clothes and rough-knuckled hands. The girls, we might imagine, are en route to the town to earn their crust with the concertina. The rooks, shown scavenging for worms, echo their toil. A single heartsease flower peeks through the grass, suggesting meager comfort. Millais was likely inspired by his late friend Deverell’s exposure of the plight of the rural poor in works such as The Irish Vagrants (1853–54) and may have conceived of the red-haired blind girl as a victim of the 1848 Irish Potato Famine, during which epidemic ophthalmia was rife and one million Irish emigrated. Certainly, The Blind Girl responds to the severity of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which made no provision for vagrants, meaning that workhouses were obliged to offer relief only to those holding legal settlement within their catchment area. By 1837, workhouses did have “casual wards” for cases of “sudden and urgent necessity,” offering a night’s shelter in return for labor—but conditions were harsher even than on the main wards. One outcome of the Act was a dramatic rise in the number of blind children removed into the care of voluntary institutions for the blind.22 This may explain the sense of fear of separation between the girls, which Barlow observes.23 In venturing into Winchelsea to try their luck with the concertina, they risk separation or arrest for begging or sleeping rough, in accordance with the 1824 Vagrancy Act. With this in mind, we might think of the city walls in The Blind Girl as standing not only for the boundaries of her sightless world that enclose her in darkness but also for the alienation of the itinerant pauper. Millais had treated the subject of the biblical flood in his painting The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851) and in his pen and ink drawing The Eve of the

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Deluge (1850). The Blind Girl, therefore, might also reference the aftermath of the deluge and a postlapsarian landscape, replete with the trials of poverty and the hardship of labor. As Max Schulz has noted in Paradise Preserved (1986), given that in Pre-Raphaelite painting “the repetition of features from one composition to another was a key means of communicating meaning,” it is striking that “the Dove of the Annunciation and of the Ark has evolved into one of nature’s scavengers”—the rook.24 With her nose pressed against the folds of the blind girl’s head shawl, the younger girl is shown experiencing at once the extraordinary vision of the rainbow (symbol of the covenant) and the ordinary, even comforting, smell of old, worn fabric. The disparity between the sublime illusion of the distant, ephemeral rainbow and the tangible proximity of the shawl, which she holds to her face, makes the lacuna between the divine covenant with its promise of salvation and the realities of everyday hardship all the more poignant. However, as Barlow has noted, “inaccessible, half-hidden and fortified,” the town is as much “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as it is a sign of divine promise.”25 The Grateful Blind Girl The nineteenth century saw a groundswell of charitable support for the blind. Between 1799 and 1899, the number of institutions and societies for the blind rose in Victorian Britain from 4 to 154. The Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind was founded in 1854; it supported itinerant musicians, provided training in craft employment, and established a braille library, among other initiatives. In his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew urged people to distinguish between “determined beggars and the really deserving and helpless blind” and not to allow their sympathies to be “blunted against all, because some are bad.”26 In this climate, Millais’s painting played to growing sentimentality and pity. Seated on the ground with a child nestled against her, wearing a simple headdress and forming a dominant pyramid structure within the composition, the figure of the blind girl draws closely on the iconography of the Virgin Mary. Yet even as the child’s beauty radiates innate purity, the invitation to gaze at her, uninterrupted by a returning look, provides an opportunity for erotic fantasies about virgin touch and the touch of the blind. The trope of the blind beggar was one of several literary and artistic stereotypes of physical disability in the nineteenth century. Like the sentimental stock figure of the heroic injured war veteran (as in Millais’s The Order of Release, 1853), images of the blind beggar typically promoted the idea of the “deserving poor.” This worked to justify increased rates of expenditure at a time when many feared that, without appropriate training, disabled children would grow up to be dependent on the state. As historian Martha Stoddart Holmes observes, “disabled children—blind ones in particular—were the preferred figures of disability in the

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Victorian imagination.”27 While many “Christians” regarded uneducated deaf children as bereft of morality because of their ignorance of the word of the Lord, the conceit of the poor, grateful Christian blind girl, blessed with spiritual insight, was less problematic in eliciting sympathy.28 In 1840, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston (where Helen Keller later studied), wrote a report on the tuition of Bridgman. Finding her “radiant with intelligence,” he suggested it would “be difficult to find a child . . . more contented and cheerful, or to whom existence seems a greater blessing.”29 She inspired Dickens’s spiritualized heroine Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41).30 Arguably, Keller later styled herself upon this conceit in her writings and self-portraits, even as she promoted a corrective to the earlier stereotype of the blind as uneducated, poor, and vulnerable. Millais may have had in mind a poem entitled “The Blind Girl” (1845) by the Cambridge-educated banker, writer, and poet Robert Snow. Here the blind girl addresses her sister: sister, I have oft suspected To idle grief thou dost incline; Now by the throb thou art detected Of thy fingers pressed to mine. Declaring herself full of gratitude for her remaining senses, she explains: I a stranger am to weeping; . . . Evermore, awake or sleeping Flows the current of my joy. Rejoicing in her rich sensorial experience of God’s bounty, it is, she says, by the “sense sublime of smelling / I know the fields the Lord hath blessed.”31 As the curator Alison Smith has observed, the poignancy of the painting “comes from the viewer’s apprehension that the beauty of the natural world, disclosed by the burst of intense sunlight that follows a storm, is a sight denied to the blind girl.”32 The art critic J. E. Phythian in 1911 described how “there rushes upon us a sense of the great disinheritance of the blind; and inevitably, with our sorrow for them, comes a joyous recognition of all that sight means to us.”33 Using an eighteenth-century trope, the blind girl wears a label that says “pity the blind.” Here, however, the letters are shaded, with just the “D” lit up by the sun, as if a little light filters through to her, an idea supported, as Rosenfeld has indicated, by the fact that her blue eyes are just visible beneath her lashes.34 Yet Millais creates a sense of pathos not only by urging our pity for the girl and our gratitude for our own senses but also through recognizing that the blind girl does not deem herself as dispossessed, but as rich with the blessings of the Lord.

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She enjoys, for example, concertina music, birdsong, meadow scents, and the warmth of the sun. A similar idea was later conveyed in Florence Earle Coates’ poem “Helen Keller with a Rose” (1905), which concludes with the couplet: “For God who made—oh, kind!— / Beauty for one and all, gave fragrance for the blind!” In both painting and Snow’s poem, far from pitying the blind girl, we are invited to commend her serenity. Her faith in the Lord’s protective care makes her worthy of charity, while conveniently assuaging one’s guilt about not doing more. Since she experiences God through her remaining senses, the motif in Millais’s painting of the town walls, with their gates (or senses), might also suggest her emergence from conventional symbolic boundaries (the trope of helpless, blind femininity) through her deep faith and gratitude.35 In Snow’s poem, it is the sister who weeps and the blind girl who says: Sister, I make no vain pretences Weighing thus my gifts with thine; For I have, as thou hast, senses To comprehend that word—to shine. Indeed, she says: A day shall dawn, a day of brightness . . . When we alike in robes of whiteness Shall see our Maker face to face. In this way, she is like the scentless camellia, which will be endowed with fragrance in Heaven, according to the author of “Flower Odors.”36 For, as art historian George Landow explains, “in the new and better world to come, Christ will raise the blind girl with new and better vision.”37 By associating the divine grace of “the blind girl” with the scent of the fields that “the Lord hath blessed,” Snow challenged the traditional emphasis of blindness with materiality.38 Literary historian Mary Ann O’Farrell argues that, in the Victorian literary imagination, blindness permitted “an enviable access to a way of knowing and experiencing objects” (for example, the miscellanea of the cluttered Victorian parlor), “as if from among them rather than from the abstracting distance imposed by sight.” This envy, she argues, “bespeaks a craving for a more tactile and bodily—that is, more material—relation to materiality.”39 Yet, in both Snow’s poem and Millais’s painting, the blind girl’s “enviable” connection is to her spirituality rather than to the conspicuous consumption of modern capitalist life. While in the Christian parables, the miracle of the cured blind person stands for the nonbeliever’s conversion, here the conceit is of divine contemplation undistracted by visual spectacle. Millais invites reflection on our own spiritual presence at a time when church attendance was dwindling, and issues

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of faith and doubt were on his mind. In 1854, as Deverell lay dying, Millais had attempted to persuade him to see a priest and was distressed by the atheist’s refusal.40 The question then for the viewer is: Are we to be like the blind girl, who believes unconditionally without seeing, or like Doubting Thomas (referenced in the painting by St. Thomas’s Church, Winchelsea, on the horizon line), who insisted on seeing and poking Christ’s wounds?41 Though not intended as companion pieces, Autumn Leaves (see fig. 31) offers a counterpoint to The Blind Girl with its springtime setting. Millais worked on them both in Perthshire in the autumn of 1855 (when he began Autumn Leaves and added the figures to The Blind Girl, having painted the background in Winchelsea the previous year). The paintings feature two of the same child models. Recruited by Effie, Matilda Proudfoot was a pupil at the School of Industry in Perth, which supported poor and orphaned children, while Isabella Nicol was the daughter of a local charwoman. Both paintings evoke mood and meaning through reference to the senses. While Autumn Leaves served as a reminder of the brevity of life, The Blind Girl invited viewers to take grateful pleasure in life and its natural pleasures, and to be present to the Lord. The Odor of the Rainbow Intriguingly, on sending the painting to the Royal Academy in 1856, Millais wrote to his parents-in-law, “I did not attach any poetry quotation to the ‘Blind Girl’ but sent it with the above title,” which might imply that he considered a poem.42 The poem “The Blind Girl” was published in Snow’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent and Other Miscellaneous Poems (1845). Whether Millais had read it is unproven, but this volume of travel poetry might have appealed to him, given that, in 1853, he wrote to his friend and patron Mrs. Combe that “next Spring I propose leaving England for the Continent, as I am sick of this rain and freezing climate.”43 According to his son, John Guille Millais, he was “an omnivorous reader” and “nothing pleased him better than a veritable history of travels and adventures in foreign lands.”44 Millais may also have come to the volume for its essay on art: in addition to poetry and travel notes, Memorials of a Tour of the Continent included a twenty-page essay entitled “Observations on Imitation” (1847). In it, Snow expanded on Joshua Reynolds’s Thirteenth Discourse, arguing that art must imitate nature through its own principles, and used the artworks he had encountered on his travels to illustrate his points. Alternatively, Millais could have come across the poem when an extract was published in Notes and Queries in 1851. This is feasible; we know Millais’s friend and collaborator, Rossetti, read the journal and that by the 1870s Rossetti was an occasional contributor. We also know from Millais’s son that later in life, at least, the artist read “the daily papers, a magazine or two and one or two weeklies such as Punch, The World or the Illustrated London News.”45 Published weekly, the journal Notes

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and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists etc was packed with much that would have intrigued Millais, from obscure folklore and forgotten customs to points of interest relating to early prose romances, medieval and Renaissance legend, and Shakespeare. From 1853, many pages were devoted to Thackeray’s The Newcomes, the serial novel that hooked Millais during his visit to Winchelsea in the late summer and autumn of 1854. These included discussion of literary precedents, errors, and speculations as to real-life counterparts of fictional characters—so it is even possible that an enjoyment of these threads led him to explore back issues. Indeed, Millais may have wanted to prepare in advance of his friend’s visit to see him in Winchelsea.46 This is relevant as a stanza from Snow’s poem “The Blind Girl” was cited in Notes and Queries as part of a chain of correspondence on the theme of “The Odour from the Rainbow.” Over several issues, readers exchanged literary references to the scent of wet earth, grass, and flowers when the sun comes out after a rainstorm and a rainbow is to be seen—the aroma now known as “petrichor.”47 The passage cited reads: Once on the porch while I was resting To hear the raindrops in their mirth, You said you saw the rainbow cresting The heavens with colours based on earth: And I believe it fills the showers With music; and when sweeter air Than common breathes from briar-rose bowers, I think the rainbow has touched there. Other citations came from a range of sources, including Table Talk (1835) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Browne’s Britannia Pastorals (1613), and Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum (1651), in which “the sweet Dew of the Raine Bow” is described as having a scent of “herbs and flowers, as of distilled water.” The art critic and early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, broached the subject of scent and spectacle in The Blind Girl when he reviewed the 1856 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In a magnanimous reading of the painting— considering Millais had only recently wed his former wife—Ruskin observes that “the sun has but this moment come out after a shower and the smell of the grass is pleasant. . . . An intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud.”48 For viewers of the painting, rainbows held deep Christian significance. Indeed, Ruskin in The Stones of Venice (1851–52) had written of “that heavenly circle which binds the statues of colour upon the front of the sky, when it becomes the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divine light were sanctified on the human heart forever.”49 As a reminder of divine covenant and the promise of redemption, the rainbow suggests the “better world to come”

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for the blind girl and for all believers.50 By the nineteenth century, the rainbow was also a symbol of Christ. Later in 1865, across the Atlantic, the Reverend James Manning Sherwood, a Presbyterian minister in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote a passage in the American journal Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly Devoted to Religious and Useful Literature, of which he was editor, that encapsulates this theme: “Christ is the token of a tempest ended, a darkness passed, even as the bow only comes forth when the rain is over and gone. . . . The Sun of Righteousness beams out sweetly and clearly in the soul’s purified air and gilds the clouds of sorrow and sin; the heart is all fresh and fragrant with new spiritual life, as when the grass and trees sparkle with drops left by a departed shower; peace and stillness reign . . . and wide and high in the soul’s sky is reared the jeweled arch of hope.”51 Millais’s radiant pastoral scene might then be considered as a scene of redemption and as an allegorical sacramental landscape, in which Communion is achieved through sensorial—indeed synesthetic—appreciation of the natural world.52 As in Hunt’s The Light of the World of 1851–53, light, like the rainbow, may have signaled God’s omnipresence, but so indeed could scent, and if scent offered a bridge between earth and heaven, the rainbow gave that bridge a visible sign. Swinging the Censer From about 1848 to 1855, critics variously denounced the Pre-Raphaelites as Catholic or Tractarian, identifying High Church influence in their revivalism of aspects of the “early Christian” painting style. While living in Oxford during the summer of 1849, Millais is thought to have heard the Oxford Movement leader Edward Pusey preach, which may have inspired his painting Christ in the House of His Parents; from the late 1850s, he worshipped at the High Anglican church of St Andrew’s, Wells Street, London.53 He also had extensive contacts with the Oxford Movement through his friend Thomas Combe, a patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, although, as art historian Tim Barringer notes, Christ in the House of His Parents was bought by a Nonconformist from the opposite end of the religious spectrum.54 Millais’s precise stance on his Christian faith is ambiguous, and the young artist could be irreverent, as suggested by the anecdote of the sermon at the Winchelsea church.55 The Blind Girl, with its emphasis on social justice, might be said to have more in common with Broad Church sympathies (see fig. 42). Moreover, Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail in works such as Ophelia (1851–52) and, to a lesser degree, The Blind Girl (with its looser handling) might even be paralleled with the “minute philosophy” of Kingsley’s Broad Church, which found the revelatory “hand of God” at the cellular level. Just as Kingsley found spiritual peace inhaling the incense of pine trees, so Millais explored the spiritual resonance of the scent of autumn leaves and fresh wet grass after a rainstorm.

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In contrast, Solomon’s approach to Aestheticism and the worship of beauty (as the next phase on from Pre-Raphaelitism) reveals a fascination with the sensual elements of High Church Christian ritualism in his “ceremonial” works of the 1860s and early 1870s. Raised an Orthodox Jew, Solomon would have been familiar with the role of smell in Hebraic theology and practice as well as in the customs of Jewish life, as the Dalziel brothers’ engravings after his Old Testament scenes, Jewish Women Burning Incense (1862) and Offering Incense (1869), suggest.56 Jewish tradition was steeped in scented oils and ointments, while incense played a key role in temple worship as being symbolic of prayer, uniting man with God and calming the deity. From this background, and in the context of Jewish Emancipation, which from 1828 to 1858 had seen the piecemeal lifting of legal restrictions on Jews in Britain, thus widening opportunities and experiences, he was drawn to ritual across religions, ancient and modern. Indeed, as art historian Colin Cruise argues, he “pressed all religions into his service” in scenes ranging from the ancient Rome of Heliogabalus to Old Testament Babylon and from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglo-Catholic ritualism.57 In Solomon’s bodycolor on paper Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost (1863), two young men approach an altar (fig. 43). With heads inclined as if whispering, their bodies just touching, the intimacy between them is reinforced by the painting’s title, which suggests participation in a shared act, though it is the older youth who swings the censer. As Cruise argues, it is often hard to identify “the exact nature of the religious experience” and “precise denominational position” of Solomon’s works.58 Here, however, the title pinpoints the celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, while the image suggests the incensing of the altar in preparation for mass. The gleaming gold of the thurible and candelabra, the shimmering silks of vestment and cassock, the lilies on the altar, and the painting’s rich play of reds, golds, greens, and whites create a highly sensuous image; the visual emphasis on the lustrous paraphernalia creates a sense of awe and wonder that brings attention to the unseen divine presence. The work reveals Solomon’s attraction to the sensorial aesthetics of Catholic and High Anglican worship, also reflected in The Deacon (1863) and The Mystery of Faith (1870). The sensorial effects—the color, light, scent, and motion of the swaying censer and its chinking chains—would have reminded viewers of the multisensory ritualism of a Catholic or High Anglican church, at a time when Catholicism and Catholic-inspired ritual within High Anglican churches was on the rise in England and increasingly taboo. At the same time, his depiction of beautiful young men in cassocks pertains to popular homosexual fantasies of the mid- to late nineteenth century about the ambiguous masculinity of Catholic priests and acolytes and their potential relations, as well as the subservience of the congregation kneeling before the priest at mass. From the 1870s to the early 1900s, it was widely understood that the theater, costumes, ornamentation, and sheer sensuality of Roman Catholic and High Anglican church ritual

Fig. 43  Simeon Solomon, Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, 1863. Bodycolor on paper mounted on canvas, 40.3 × 34.8 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Photo: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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held a hedonistic and even eroticized allure for some homosexual men, and that these churches provided a form of refuge.59 To paint such a scene was a bold move. Close friends with Rossetti since about 1858, and a leading light of Aestheticism (until his arrest for attempted sodomy in 1873 cost him his friendships, reputation, and career), Solomon would have been acutely aware that critics had blasted early Pre-Raphaelitism for appearing to demonstrate Oxford Movement sympathies. So severe was this criticism that Rossetti moved away from overtly religious paintings and, for the most part, shunned public exhibition. Yet here was Solomon connecting to the current controversy around Catholic ritualism in a painting that challenges the asceticism of Protestant art by mirroring the decorative and artistic imperative of High Anglican interiors and that hints, however obliquely, at a sensibility of illegal same-sex desire. Daringly, he also implicates the viewer in the experience by placing the viewpoint close to the picture plane, as if we share the space and breathe the sacred incense radiating toward us. By 1863, when Solomon was painting Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, the post-Reformation legality of the liturgical use of incense was a key point of controversy in the Anglican Church, despite its having been forbidden by the bishop of London in 1858. Indeed, ritualism was one of the most hotly debated topics of Victorian life, being a mainstay in the tracts of The Church Association (the evangelists of which led the fight against it), and widely discussed in the press and in cultural commentary. By 1859, the issue had become so polemic that riots broke out in Stepney, London, at the church of St. George’s in the East, in response to the use of ritualistic devices such as censing, crosses, lighted candles on the altar, choirboys, and surplices.60 The church’s rector, Bryan King, had studied at Oxford in the 1830s, where he fell under the spell of Pusey, whose sermons later inspired King to introduce the theater of ritual into the bleak lives of the East End poor. Ostensibly an attack on ritualist liturgy, the riots, which took place every Sunday for nine months, were marked by anti-Catholic tension. Sparked by the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act and amplified by the reestablishment in 1850 of a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in England for the first time since the Reformation, this hatred had taken root with the rise of Catholicism in Britain and was cemented by the mass immigration of the Irish poor to England. For the anti-Puseyites, therefore, “the smell of incense flung, now over the altar, now over the book from which the Gospel is read, and now into the faces of all the performers in the chancel” symbolized the perceived taint of “Romish” or “Popish” corruption and idolatry infiltrating the Church of England as well as fears and prejudices generated by immigration.61 Hostile accounts of ritualism emphasized the “foppery” and “effeminacy” of participating clergymen, to quote Kingsley, who, as an advocate of “muscular Christianity” and “Christian manliness,” wrote a vitriolic attack on the Oxford Movement in 1864.62 Likewise, a writer for The Times reporting on a service

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at St. Alban’s Church in Holborn, London, in 1866, noted the “gold and green dresses” worn by the priests and commented that the “flaunting dresses and candles and odours and gesticulations have in them something almost nauseous to an ordinary English stomach.”63 Though it is not known to have been exhibited, Solomon’s Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, with its glistening vestments, lilies, and censers, would have invited direct comparison to the services at St. Alban’s Church, where, according to art historian Lionel Lambourne, Solomon and his friend Pater attended services.64 The cultural historian Dominic Janes has suggested that, as Solomon became fascinated with Christian ritualism, he developed a coded language for exploring and legitimating male homosexual identity and sexual acts. For example, Janes argues that Solomon depicts the ritual of benediction as a metaphor for samesex intercourse in his watercolor The Mystery of Faith (1870). He points to the phallic monstrance (the vessel that carries the Host) and argues that, for the congregation, the ingestion of the wafer as it dissolves on the tongue represents the gratification of physically consuming a man (Christ). While for many such a concept would have been both abhorrent and blasphemous, Janes argues that Solomon sought to reframe male-on-male intercourse as a form of sacred purification.65 Building on Janes’s argument, we might point to the phallic nature of the incense burner, ejaculating its purifying scent in Solomon’s Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost. Like the wafer that is ingested, incense is also taken into the body, the inhalation of the fragrant particles binding the congregation in the shared sacred proceedings and providing a symbolic representation of the invisible action of Communion that is taking place.66 In these and other ways, Solomon sanctifies sex. Censing Sexuality With its suggestion of a remote and exotic Eastern Orthodox setting, Solomon’s watercolor A Saint of the Eastern Church of 1867–68 was seemingly on safer ground (fig. 44). When it was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1868, a critic for The Architect gave it “nothing but the highest praise,” found its coloring “chaste,” and deemed it “one of the most attractive [works], to a refined taste, in the Gallery.”67 In the painting, a haloed young man in a decorative tunicle, with dark hair and a deeply introspective gaze, carries a sprig of myrtle and, once again, a censer emits fumes of incense. From the ceiling, two lamps are suspended by chains, which appear to be strung with little bells. Made at a key moment within the long-running “bells and smells” controversy, the work could hardly fail to evoke ritualism, despite its Eastern European context.68 In 1867, charges had been made against the Reverend A. H. Mackonochie of St. Alban’s Church in Holborn, London, for “censing things and persons” as well as for elevating the host above his head, using a mixed chalice and altar lights, and

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kneeling during the prayer of consecration. In January 1869, just months after the Dudley Gallery exhibition, the judge, Sir Robert Phillimore (Dean of the Arches), was to rule that the ceremonial use of incense during Holy Communion was illegal. The following year, the use of incense in preparation for Holy Communion was ruled illegal in the case of the Bishop of Winchester v. the Rev. Richard Hooker Edward Wix; and in 1876, judges finally ruled incense-burning illegal in church processions.69 In the five years that followed the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, five clergymen were imprisoned for breaking the law with respect to ritual. Given the intensity of the controversy over incense in 1867–68, and the perception of Catholic and High Anglican churches as a haven for illegal homosexuality, Solomon was fortunate to receive such positive reviews, though the Athenaeum described the watercolor as “lacking manliness.”70 The art historian Allen Staley suggests that Solomon, who rated it the best work he had ever done, likely sent it to the Summer Exhibition, despite the Royal Academy’s focus on oil paintings. There, it may have been rejected on the grounds of its medium, or, as Staley suggests, because of growing prejudice against the artist’s friendship with Swinburne and the poet’s marked influence on the homoerotic tenor of Solomon’s work.71 Perhaps, too, the jury turned their noses up at the taint of incense and tinkle of bells, regardless of the Eastern Church setting. Whatever the case, A Saint of the Eastern Church resonates with symbolism. Myrtle, sacred to the goddess Venus, traditionally symbolizes everlasting love but is also associated with shame and nakedness. In classical culture, its leaves shielded Venus from prying eyes, while in Christianity, it stood for the scent of the Garden of Eden. Associated with “phallic, masculine essence” or sexual vigor, it was traditional, as Solomon expert Carolyn Conroy has indicated, for Jews to present the fragrant flower to bridegrooms (a recurrent figure in Solomon’s work) as they enter the nuptial bedchamber.72 In Judaism, myrtle has a special significance as one of the four sacred plants at Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. Lacking taste, but with sweet, spice-scented flowers and mildly aromatic leaves that hint of orange and eucalyptus, it stands for the unlearned Jew who has no knowledge of the Torah but nonetheless performs good deeds (rather like the humble, sweet violets in Lake’s Christian tract of 1848). The Christian Bible also references it as a symbol of God’s blessing.73 Finally, myrtle is associated with perfume, since the ancient Greek word for myrtle—murtos—relates to “muron,” or scented oil. Myrtle recurs in Solomon’s oeuvre, including The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865) and A Deacon (1863), and, as Carolyn Conroy argues, he used it to signify love as simultaneously sacred and secular.74 In A Saint of the Eastern Church, he juxtaposes the phallic thurible (with its purifying release of incense) and the fragrant myrtle, which is suggestive of love, sexual potency, good deeds, and God’s blessing. In this way, the painting might suggest male love and the male orgasm as divine forces for good that,

Fig. 44  Simeon Solomon, A Saint of the Eastern Church (formerly called A Greek Acolyte), 1867–68. Watercolor over pencil with gum on paper, 45.2 cm × 32.8 cm. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images.

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Fig. 45  Simeon Solomon, Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome, 1866. Pencil and watercolor heightened with bodycolor with gum arabic, 47.6 × 28.9 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

like the myrtle, emanate fragrant goodness. At the same time, the suggestion of hiding in shame is intriguing, given the context of Victorian homophobia. Like Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost and A Saint of the Eastern Church, Solomon’s sumptuous watercolor Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome of 1866 (fig. 45) also seemingly relates sexual release to incense purification. In glowing robes of lustrous splendor, the Syrian-born, third-century Roman emperor and high priest of the sun god leans languidly against a marble altar in a richly decorated temple chamber, nonchalantly swinging a censer at his side, incense fumes softly diffusing against the glinting gold decor. Notorious for sadism and lovers of both sexes, and for declaring himself to be both a woman and the sun god, Heliogabalus was a risqué subject for exhibition at the Dudley Gallery.75 In 1871, Solomon’s friend Swinburne described the painting as “symbolic . . . of the lusts of the flesh and the secrets of the soul, of the kingdom of this world and the mystery of another.”76 That Solomon associated

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scented ritualism with his sexuality is apparent from a letter he wrote in the mid-1880s to the photographer Frederick Hollyer. In it, he suggested that his admirer, the outrageous aesthete Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock, had met him with a “low and truly Oriental salute while swinging a silver censer before an altar covered with lilies, myrtles, lighted candles and a sanctuary lamp burning with scented oil.”77 Such a description casts Stenbock in the role of a modernday Heliogabalus.78 Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On Fortescue-Brickdale’s Post-Pre-Raphaelite watercolor The Lover’s World (1901 or 1905; fig. 46) is quite different from both the midcentury Pre-Raphaelite realism of Millais’s The Blind Girl and the sensuous Aestheticism of Solomon in the 1860s. These are disparate examples, chosen from a broader set of possibilities on the theme of scent and spirituality, each offering alternative perspectives on “nature’s incense” or High Church ritual at different moments during the long-running “bells and smells” debate. Yet the mix of natural detail, jewel-like colors, and dreamy symbolism in The Lover’s World suggests Fortescue-Brickdale’s descent through Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticist lines via her teacher, Byam Shaw, who was Millais’s protégé and much inspired by Waterhouse. Like The Blind Girl (see fig. 42), the painting depicts a spring morning, features a rainbow, and suggests the fresh scent of dewy grass to evoke themes of spiritual renewal. Moreover, in representing censers, it too brings to mind the “bells and smells” controversy that chimed on into the early twentieth century. Despite the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, ritualism had continued to flourish in London, prompting the archbishops of Canterbury and York, in a pronouncement of 1899, to reiterate the illegality of incense and processional lights in Anglican liturgy. By the turn of the century, more than four thousand clergy belonged to the leading Anglo-Catholic ritualist society, and some aspects of Catholic liturgical practices were increasingly normative within the Anglican Church. With its natural setting, The Lover’s World has none of the provocativeness of Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, being suggestive instead, like The Blind Girl, of the natural world as sacramental. All three paintings address themes of love and renewal, from human charity and God’s tender care in The Blind Girl, to sex and spirituality in Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, and romantic and spiritual love in The Lover’s World. Finally, in different ways, they each draw upon the relationship of the visual and the olfactory to explore ideas of external worlds and interiority, the seen and the unseen, and sight and spiritual insight. In The Lover’s World, the figure of a girl wearing an emerald-green dress in the Aesthetic Movement style is depicted gazing at a pair of songbirds perched, open-beaked, among blossom-laden blackthorn while, among the dewy grasses and daisies at her feet, fairy attendants swing golden censers billowing clouds of

Fig. 46  Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, The Lover’s World, 1901 or 1905. Watercolor on paper, 111.6 × 66 cm. Bristol Museums and Art Gallery. Photo: Bristol Museums and Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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incense. These fairies dance and drift through gusts of scented vapor that swirl and sweep across this flowery fantasia. The more one looks, the more one sees, from the glossy emerald beads strung about the girl’s neck to the details of the wood pigeon’s plumage and the harebells in the meadow. Yet, as a critic for the Magazine of Art observed two years earlier in relation to Fortescue-Brickdale’s general style: “It is as much things felt as seen that the artist will have us know of. The mere surface of appearance will not suffice. It is the germ and the essence, which lie dormant under the surface, of which the artist will make us cognizant. It is this striving after the fundamental and the spiritual which makes both her naturalism and her symbolism integral parts of her artistic equipment.”79 As the writer Edith Sichel put it: “Fortescue-Brickdale brings the invisible into play . . . whilst not letting the visible go to the dogs.”80 In the watercolor, the visualization of invisible smell—here given a translucent, gossamer-like presence through a cocktail of thinly applied white, gray, blue, mauve, lilac, and pink watercolors— is integral to the creation of that sense of “things felt, not seen.” Smell is the sense of transitions, of shapeshifting and decomposition. Despite Havelock Ellis’s insistence on the vagaries of olfactory science, by 1905 it was well-known that smell indicates the transition of odor molecules from gross matter to gas. In the watercolor, smell signifies the threshold between visual and nonvisual states. Like the volatile scent that envelops them, the fairies are depicted on the borderland between the seen and the unseen, now metamorphosing out of the frothy vapor, now deliquescing back into it. The visual elision of fairies with scent (heralding inner truth) suggests that these nebulous spirits personify the scent or soul of the flowers. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, the artist explained that the realm inhabited by the girl is fragranced by the “sweet odours of the spirits of the scented flowers.”81 The metaphoric collapsing of scent and spirit is confirmed in the picture by the depiction of the fairy queen, complete with crown, who rises out of the incense smoke to present herself in deference to the girl. The puff of floral incense rising up at her side echoes her curves, forming an olfactory counterpart to her elongated body. These fairy spirits hover on the edge of actualization: not quite in being, they herald their presence as an odor. Conversely, scent, or the inner spirit of the flowers, is externalized in fleshed-out fairy form. Like Millais’s blind girl, the fairies are sightless—their eyes are closed, blank, or obscured—immersed as they are in the world of scent and the interior realms of the spirit. The painting was shown in June 1905 as part of the second of Fortescue-Brickdale’s one-woman exhibitions, “Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of!” [sic], held at the Dowdeswell Galleries on New Bond Street. The Shakespearean exhibition title suggests both the content and matter of dreams. In The Lover’s World, we see both the fairy fantasia and the fragrant fog that gives a near-tangible presence to the physical matter or “stuff” of the imagination, whence these fanciful forms arise.82 It can be read as a romantic reverie, a glimpse into the mindscape

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of one in love. As a writer for The Girl’s Own Annual, penning under the name “A Welsh Spinster,” observed to her young female charges, Fortescue-Brickdale’s paintings give an insight into “the holy of holies—the inner chamber of the mind of a girl.”83 The painting explores the power of love to open the door to another, never-before-experienced, fantasy world while blinding us to reason, logic, and everyday practicalities. In The Lover’s World, the ecstasy of being newly in love is presented as a spring awakening and as a metaphor for Communion. As Fortescue-Brickdale explained in the exhibition catalogue, the painting discloses “the mysteries of Spring, the Springtime of Youth, of the World, of Love. As a flower-sheath drops and shows the bud, so has love unfolded and shown to this girl Life, Song, Colour and Music. With clasped hands, an action suggestive of awakening after sleep, she moves amid Spring Flowers.”84 Resplendent with ideas of freshness and of new life bursting in all its sensuous glory, The Lover’s World, like The Blind Girl (see fig. 42), draws upon religious iconography of resurrection and the purged spirit. In his religious tract The Ministry of Nature (1871), Macmillan described floral scent as “a sign of perfect purity, health and vigour . . . a symptom of full and joyous existence.” Likening fragrance to prayer, floral scents, he suggested, are “grateful, unconscious acknowledgements from the heart of nature for the timely blessings of the great world-covenant,” words that convey the spirit of both The Blind Girl and The Lover’s World.85 Like incense burned in church as a visible and olfactory conduit between earth and heaven, and the odor of the rainbow that bridges these realms, the floral incense spiraling from the fairies’ censers in The Lover’s World symbolizes divine communication and the heavenly ascension of prayer.86 Together, the censers and the bells hanging under the branches are suggestive of the “bells and smells” of Anglo-Catholic ritualism and can be read as a celebration of, in Fortescue-Brickdale’s words, “the moment of Nature’s High Mass.”87 Fortescue-Brickdale was a devout Christian whose denominational leanings are unknown. Her paintings exult in the beauty and mystery of nature and its rejuvenating spirit, pointing to the symbolism of “Natural Magic”—the title of another of her watercolors exhibited in 1905.88 The theme of scent and soul features in several of her works, including In springtime, the only pretty ring time—From As You Like It (1901), How the Lavender Came to Smell of Paradise (date unknown), and Only the Actions of the Just Smell Sweet (1911). The latter is an illustration for Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics and shows a pauper child smelling flowers at a medieval church tomb— an image reminiscent of Millais’s Winchelsea painting L’Enfant du Regiment (1854–55). A rainbow brightens the sky to the far left of The Lover’s World. Butterflies, described by the artist as “the color of Nature’s palette,” cascade through the clouds and flutter under the rainbow’s arc—a visual pun, since the collective noun for butterflies is “a rainbow.” In Millais’s painting a single tortoiseshell

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butterfly rests on the blind girl’s shawl; like the rainbow, the butterfly is both a celebration of the visual (the trompe l’oeil of an artist who can paint a butterfly as if it has just alighted on the canvas) and a symbol of the soul, that which, “my brethren,” cannot be painted.89 As in Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia (see fig. 17), butterflies were also associated with scent, being lured to the perfume of the flowers (or the woman) while giving off a sweet scent of their own—or so it was often thought. As an emblem then of both scent and soul, the butterfly, like the rainbow and like spring, stood for spiritual renewal—in these works and others, including Sandys’s Gentle Spring (pre 1865), in which the butterflies fluttering beneath the rainbow seem attracted to the spring goddess’s scent. Whether conveyed through the depiction of olfactory paraphernalia (censers) and smoke or symbolized by rainbows, butterflies, or fairies, the suggestion of scent in Millais’s The Blind Girl (see fig. 42), Solomon’s Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost (see fig. 43), and Fortescue-Brickdale’s The Lover’s World indicates the role of smell in Victorian spiritual life. Ephemeral and “of the air,” rainbows, fairies, and butterflies give visual form or embodiment in art to the invisible and ineffable—including scent, soul, and divine presence—and often two or more of these symbols are juxtaposed to emphasize these associations. With The Blind Girl, Millais invited the viewer to experience the wonders of God’s creation not just through enjoyment of those “lollypop colors” but through all the senses. Indeed, arguably, the purpose of those radiant colors and the Pre-Raphaelite detailing is to create a scene so credible that it will invoke the sensations of this pastoral realm. Millais’s skill enables us to imagine the “odor of the rainbow” or the scent of fresh wet grass, and thus to sense our own connection to God. For the Victorians, the power of smell to herald “things felt, not seen” was proverbial, and despite, or perhaps because of, its invisibility, its visual evocation was a valuable way to point to those things. If Millais could not paint God’s love, he could certainly paint its visual and olfactory symbols.

Chapter 7

The Erotics of Scent

And the soul of the rose went into my blood. —Tennyson, Maud, 1855

From the 1860s, images of women smelling flowers were by far the most popular mode of representing scent in art and visual culture. From Watts’s Choosing (1864; see fig. 5) to Schramm’s The Perfect Scent (1897; see fig. 7), the abundance of paintings and other visual images featuring this reverie motif forms a compelling body of evidence about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of femininity. Pictures of women inhaling floral scents (usually represented as a solitary activity) impart a variety of messages. Flowers can be shown to be smelled in manifold ways, and interpretations of such images depend on subtle distinctions in the visual presentation of the olfactory experience. A variety of factors, such as the precise way in which the flower is held and its distance from the nose, as well as body posture, facial expression, open or closed eyes, clothes, and environment, have a significant bearing on the representation of femininity. Whether the female figure is shown daintily tilting the rose to her face, presenting the blossom to her lover, or lustily burying her nose into a lavish bloom, the simple gesture of smelling flowers can present different meanings, including eligibility for polite courtship, sexual impropriety, and the fantasy of sexual abandon. It can suggest pre-sexual innocence and a child’s inquisitiveness about the world—as in the sentimental Smelling (1909) by the American magazine illustrator Bessie Pease Gutmann—or, seemingly, the first awakening of sexual desire in a child, as in Léon Frédéric’s disturbing painting The Fragrant Air (1894; see fig. 2). Likewise, paintings of women smelling flowers range from innocent pleasure—as in Curran’s Chrysanthemums of 1890, in which a mother guides her young daughter in smelling the flowers in a greenhouse—to unrefined sensuality, as one critic read Waterhouse’s The Shrine (1895;

Fig. 47  Whitman Studio photographer, Helen Keller, no. 8, ca. October 28, 1904. Photographic print. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-23661.

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see fig. 54).1 According to art historian Lou Charnon-Deutsch, the depiction of women holding lilies holds echoes of the purity of the Virgin Mary, while “women smelling roses appear to have already savored the perfume of love.”2 Yet much depends upon the type of bloom, the manner of sniffing, and who is doing the deed. Visual interplay with the olfactory invited such a variety of symbolic attachments that nineteenth-century artists across countries, styles, and movements used this motif as a versatile sign of female sexuality representing anything from moral laxity to innocent chastity. A photograph taken by the Whitman Studio in 1904 exemplifies how nuanced such imagery could be. It shows Helen Keller, at age twenty-four, elegantly dressed and reading a braille book while smelling a rose, which she bends toward herself from a vase on her desk (fig. 47). As her fingers garner information from the page, she simultaneously breathes in rose scent and computes what it conveys. Holding the flower by the stem, she has angled it perpendicularly to her nose in a manner reminiscent of images current in contemporary photography and illustration, in which fashionable Edwardian young ladies stiffly hold the earpiece of a candlestick telephone while speaking gaily and very directly into the mouthpiece.3 In this respect, the image is perhaps an acknowledgment of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and of his pivotal role in Keller’s life. A devoted advocate for blind and deaf children, Bell was one of the first to recognize her potential to learn. On meeting the seven-year-old in 1887, he advised her parents to send for a specialist teacher from the Perkins Institution for the Blind, a decision that changed the course of her life.4 Later, in 1896, Bell was instrumental in setting up the Helen Keller Fund to pay for her continued education. By 1904, their friendship was strong and her gratitude great.5 That year, she became the first deaf-blind person to be awarded a bachelor’s degree— graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts—and a year earlier she had dedicated her first book, The Story of My Life (1903) to him. At this time, more than three million telephones had been installed in the United States; about 8 percent of American households had one.6 By offering a visual parallel to telephone use, the image evokes a mystic counterpart to technology, with the rose as an apparatus that transmits fragrant messages. These messages pass undetected by those not attuned to nature’s secrets, but Keller, undistracted by sight, sound, or speech, is shown as singularly well-equipped to receive them, just as she is in another Whitman Studio photograph of her “Listening to the Trees,” with her head pressed against a tree trunk.7 Echoes of Transcendentalism (and the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Henry David Thoreau and others) still reverberated in New England in the early 1900s and ran through Helen Keller’s writings with a focus on the mystic essence of nature. On seeing the picture in the January 1905 issue of The Century Magazine, Florence Earle Coates (later poet laureate of Pennsylvania) imagined a two-way communication: a dialogue between self and universe. In her poem “Helen Keller with a Rose,” printed in the same publication that July, Coates

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Fig. 48  Rudolph Eickemayer, The Bridal Rose, 1900. Photogravure. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1972 (1972.644.5). Copy photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2020. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.

imagines Keller confiding to the rose: “We understand each other, thou and I! / . . . Thou feelest all the voiceless things I speak / And to my yearning makest mute reply.”8 For Coates then, the image, like Keller’s writings, resonates with the legacy of New England’s literary Transcendentalism, showing a self-reliant Keller tapping into the wonders of the universe; by granting permission for the image to be published alongside the poem, Keller, whose faith resonates throughout her writings, gave tacit approval to this spiritual contextualization.9 Nevertheless, for all its Transcendentalist overtones, the photograph invites voyeuristic pleasure. Locked out of Keller’s private sensory experience and fearless of being caught in the act of looking, the viewer is free to gaze on her demure beauty. Our eyes are drawn to her long eyelashes, to the light that catches on her lips, and to her breast—where a pinned rose, peeking from between the buttons of her high-necked blouse, invites the fantasy of undressing, touching and smelling, despite the hint of a self-conscious smile that betrays a knowingness that she is watched. Compare this image, however, with the utter abandon of Rudolph Eickemeyer’s photograph The Bridal Rose of 1900 (fig. 48)—an image

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of a lusty girl lost in the scent of the roses from her wedding bouquet, fantasizing, we may assume, over the consummation of her marriage—and we see that Keller is presented as upstanding and industrious.10 Although poles apart on the decorum spectrum, the images are of the same ilk, drawing on the well-established trope of a young, beautiful woman, eyes closed and lost in reverie. The Whitman Studio photograph is remarkable, however, in disrupting the paradigm of the passive and anonymous daydreamer. For despite its voyeuristic potential, this image presents Keller, the writer and thinker, seeking inspiration with the breath, with the braille book and the rose presented as tools of her trade. As with her writing, the picture she conveys is one of agency, self-invention, creativity, education, wisdom, and independence, forming a vital corrective to the traditional iconography of the blind as helpless, lacking money, education, industry, and purpose. Floral Femininity and Women’s Liberation Most “scented visions” from circa 1850 to 1914 belonged to a broader trend for “eyes-closed” reverie images. Indeed, this motif was so prevalent that images of blind women required an additional marker of blindness, such as the “Pity the blind” label in Millais’s The Blind Girl (see fig. 42) and the braille book in the photograph of Helen Keller with a rose (see fig. 47). While these depictions of young blind women suggested spiritual alertness achieved through rapt attention to present sensations, closed-eye imagery of able-sighted women smelling signaled an exclusion of the here and now—a scent-inspired inward-turn toward gendered experiences of memory, daydream, lust, and longing. Scent has, of course, a long association with the feminine—with sentiment, homemaking, and seduction, the privacy of the toilette and the intimacy of lovers—as well as with personal, womanly experiences of intuition, memory, and imagination. Indeed, as Classen has noted, most traditional female pursuits, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and caring, are associated with the lower senses of taste, touch, and smell.11 In this context, the conjunction of floral fragrance and female form in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings typically reinforces a traditional ideology of middle-class femininity in which women are associated with lovemaking and home-making rather than the wage-earning of the burgeoning class of financially independent, career-minded women to which Keller aspired.12 As the momentum for women’s liberation gathered pace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several women artists repositioned the “scented vision” away from the erotic toward the evocation of total immersion in the sensory experience. In contrast to the many voyeuristic observations of women smelling roses, Boston Transcendentalist Lilla Cabot Perry focuses on the sense of a woman’s private communion in Scent of Roses (1911). By obscuring the face, she departs from the usual sexualized blush. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s

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Fig. 49  Maria Vasilyevna Yakunchikova, The Fragrance, ca. 1894–95. Woodcut. Collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

The Lover’s World suggests an “inner sensescape” (see fig. 46), while Margaret Macdonald’s The Three Perfumes delves into the secret heart of the scent itself (see fig. 24). In her woodcut The Fragrance (ca. 1894–95), the Russian printmaker, painter, and embroiderer Maria Yakunchikova conveys the experience of smelling a daffodil as an altered state of consciousness: the disembodied head evokes an out-of-body experience, while the ethereal blue background enhances the suggestion that scent has eclipsed awareness of the present moment and triggered an inner effect (fig. 49). Having studied at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, she broke free from her teacher’s influence, even while living in Paris in the early 1890s. Very different from his eroticized Venuses and the stock “rose in bloom” beauties of late nineteenth-century art, the head in The Fragrance displays robust, masculine-looking features and is identifiable as female only by the hair, tied in a topknot. While visions of women transfixed by scent so often presented a pretext for studies of female beauty, here Yakunchikova directs our focus to the sense of an internalized, scent-induced experience. Notwithstanding the occasional feminist twist on the trope, growing numbers of artists turned to “scented visions” as a conservative response to women’s increasingly active presence in public and political life.13 The flower/woman

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metaphor was ubiquitous in the art and literature of the 1890s and early 1900s, when flowers were the single most popular symbol of femininity.14 The convention was so prosaic it often went unnoticed, and it coincided with the expectations of the day that women “look, smell, and ‘think’ like flowers.”15 The trope of women smelling with “eyes wide shut” only reinforced this passive stereotype. As early as 1834, a female critic reporting on the Paris Salon associated “scented visions” with the subjugation of women in art, seeing the fusion of the fragrant and feminine as one of many ways in which the patriarchy preserved and perpetuated a hyper-image of passive femininity. Painters represent women in all kinds of ways: they make her into a flower which decorates all the vases in the boudoir . . . they intoxicate her with perfumes and flattering words; at celebrations you would take her for a priestess clothed in the rich apparel in which they adorn her; indoors they have her lie voluptuously on a couch, her brow crowned with dreams; here like a plant caressed by the sun, they make her blossom beneath the breath of her lover, there, without respect for her modesty, they do violence to her beautiful body to drag her to execution. Alas! The author, Marie Camille de G., was a member of the Saint-Simonian collective Le Femme Libre, which had the slogan “Freedom for Women, Freedom for the People,” and the review was published in La Tribune des Femmes, an all-female socialist paper. In a nod to Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey on show at the Salon that summer, she urged “Sirs, enough of perfumes and adornments, passionate embraces and scaffolds; give woman a place worthy of her! . . . Artists! If you love woman, if sometimes her beauty has inspired your souls with poetry, if she has endowed your brush with sufficient delicacy and inspiration to fix your dreams and your joys on the canvas, show her growing in liberty.”16 Her call was unheeded, and the patriarchal subjugation of women in art continued on just these lines for decades to come. Curran’s Fairy Fantasies Many of Curran’s works typify the genre of what Annette Stott terms “floral-female painting,” and of these, several address the idea of the “scented feminine.”17 During his early career, Curran executed a number of small allegorical oil paintings referencing the Persian myth of the peris, or furies. These included The Scent of the Rose (1890; see fig. 52), painted while he was studying in Paris, and The Peris (1898; see fig. 51), The Dew (ca. 1900), The Perfume of Roses (1902; see fig. 50), and The Cobweb Dance (1908), which were all painted on his return to New York.18 In these fantasies, fairy-women “lie in beds of soft rose petals, press

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their noses to the flowers, and luxuriate in an atmosphere that one can sense palpably,” and a visual analogy is drawn between flower and female figure, with composition, color, and texture manipulated to make the women look as much like flowers as possible.19 For example, the dresses worn by the fairies in The Perfume of Roses are described in the painting’s copyright certificate as “green, red and yellowish costumes” and as corresponding with the shades of the adjacent roses of the “Bride,” “Jacqueminot,” and “Golden Gate” varieties, which are festooned about the figures. Here then, the metaphor of “woman as flower” works through the simple expedient of color juxtaposition.20 Intriguingly, the swooning rose-fairies resemble flowers not only in terms of corresponding color and appearance but also through the evocation of floral scent, suggested by their forms. In 1908, the year prior to his “Class” in Palette and Bench on how to “paint the perfumes of the flowers,” Curran wrote in the same journal about his efforts to draw out a visual comparison between woman and scent.21 The peris, as Curran explained, were fairy-like figures, inspired by Thomas Moore’s poem “Paradise and the Peri” from Lalla Rookh (1817).22 Between angels and demons, they were harmless and beautiful, yet excluded from paradise—like Keller’s “fallen angel.” In Curran’s words, they were “condemned as a punishment to live in the air and subsist on the perfume of flowers.”23 In these works, the airiness of the fairy figures acts as a metaphor for the insubstantiality of scent, while the delicate coloring and soft-tinted lighting “suggest the idea of perfume” and the scented realm within which they dwell.24 In The Perfume of Roses (fig. 50), “a warm yellow light falls across the roses and figures from the left, and from the upper right side, [while a] cool, pearly light gives an opalescent play of color on the shadow sides.”25 Other techniques for suggesting scent were also employed. Of The Peris (fig. 51), he noted “the linear scheme of the composition is that of a swinging movement, symbolizing the life in the air,” contributing to a sense both of the swooping and flitting of fairies on the wing and of flowing currents of scent.26 In The Cobweb Dance, the dewy threads of spider silk radiating from the white lilies appear like jets of scent spurting into the vapory night sky. Moreover, in The Peris, the diaphanous dresses worn by the fairies float as fragrance trails through the air and seem to diffuse into visual nothingness. These sheer, gossamer-like gowns are evocative of scent in the way that they drape against the tea-rose blossoms, with loose swirls of fabric seemingly spiraling out of the surface of the petals like fragrant emanations—a nod, perhaps, to the Transcendentalist spiral, unifying all things. Perfume and peris are coalesced in these works, in which the simple gesture of holding a flower to the nose works with effects of color and composition to suggest the scented air within which the fairies live and breathe. Curran’s sylph-like figures, nude, topless, or dressed in elegant wispy dresses, can be read as visual embodiments of insubstantial perfume; therefore, the title of The Perfume of Roses references both the olfactory and the female subjects of

Fig. 50  Charles Courtney Curran, The Perfume of Roses, 1902. Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 59.4 cm. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans.

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Fig. 51  Charles Courtney Curran, The Peris, 1898. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 45.7 × 81.3 cm. Collection of Dr. Ronald Berg.

the painting. Curran explained that, in this painting, an effort is made to personify the odors of different kinds of roses. “The seated figure at the left holds in her hands one Jacqueminot rose, her auburn hair rests against another, and she is half intoxicated with the rich, spicy odor of that rose. The standing figure beside her inhales with delight the fruity sweetness of a pink rose, while the floating figure, adorned with light draperies and opal strings, is caressing the faint-scented white rose.”27 Thus Curran’s paintings of fairy-women, subsisting on the scented air they breathe, present a fantasy in which not only is leisured femininity depicted as rose-scented but also rose scent is endowed with a visual presence through the female form. Intriguingly, Curran’s description is suggestive of Coty’s perfume La Rose Jacqueminot (ca. 1904), the pioneering, spicy scent that launched the Corsican perfumer’s career; indeed, the fairy’s auburn hair, with its fashionable styling, bears a striking similarity to that featured in an early poster for the scent. If current scholarship is correct, however, the painting predates the perfume by about two years. More likely, then, Curran had in mind the scent of the same name released by Eastman Royal Perfumes in 1887, or simply the popular rose species.28 Either way, the combination of the red, pink, and white roses and their attendant fairies brings to mind perfume as a concoction of floral scents.

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Fig. 52  Charles Courtney Curran, The Scent of the Rose, 1890. Oil on panel, 11.43 × 31 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center, © www‌.artrenewal‌.org.

Curran’s paintings present a definition of womanhood that fuses floral scent with feminine mystique, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Scent of the Rose (fig. 52). As in the slightly larger pieces already discussed, this miniature offers an intimate window onto a fairy domain, a rose bush at night. Measuring just over 11  × 31 cm, the size is appropriate for a painting that negotiates the limits of the visible and the world of the invisible through the representation of fairies and scent. Its small scale contributes to a sense of an object for private handling and pleasure. In the painting, scent drifts on airy currents, wafting from and against opulent petals, endowing the painting with a mysterious aura and forming a tantalizing veil through which the implied male voyeur can enjoy the pleasures of a secret feminine realm. Behind this perfume screen, we glimpse a nude, fairy-like figure seated within the cupped petals of a rose. Her body emerges pistil-like from among the splendid corolla: a dainty, doll-like embodiment of femininity that instantly associates female sexuality with flowers—the reproductive organs of a plant. All around her, roses are blown open, their petals peeled apart, uncurled, and outspread in seductive disarray, as if proffering their scent while lapping it up with their tongue-like forms. These overblown roses form a kind of floral constellation about her, endowing the painting with a celestial ambiance. Eyes closed, she seems lost in reverie. Her presence signifies calmness, a lull among the scent-tossed blooms. With a sense of quiet about her, her solitude is suggested through the visual emphasis upon the space that engulfs her. By meandering through the dark chasmic spaces about her, scent, as visualized, emphasizes the idea of self-absorption, reverie, and feminine pleasures—recurring themes within the “scented visions” of the period. In his fairy paintings, Curran scales women down, rendering them ephemeral and interchangeable with perfume, a key signifier of sexual availability. His paintings of the peris present the male voyeur with a safe fantasy of femininity

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in miniature, with remote yet sexually available women whiling away the hours by passively tending to flowers, disengaged from the perils and prospects of modernity. Earlier, in 1881, the New York Times had imagined the rose as the subjugated spirit of a fairy. In making attar, the critic wrote, “the rose . . . is made to yield up its sweet breath, to be afterward imprisoned in cunning little caskets and sparkling crystal flasks enriched with gilding, suggesting to the wandering fancy of the Arabian nights haunted traveller . . . the imprisoned spirit of some fairy, in eternal subjection to the powerful genie man.”29 To refigure women as perfume was to subjugate them, and even the perfume could be imagined as an enslaved fairy/woman. Such a reading may explain the appeal of Curran’s works among middleclass male patrons of the arts who favored the suggestion of a floral femininity embodying, in Stott’s terms, “cultivated beauty, silence, moral purity, graceful but limited movement, decorative function and a discreet suggestion of fertility.”30 The Peris and The Perfume of the Roses were bought by William T. Evans, a dry-goods magnate who, from 1891, housed his collection of contemporary American art in a purpose-built picture gallery in his New York mansion.31 Such works were also of national public interest. The Peris earned the artist an honorable mention when lent by its second owner, the American banker and philanthropist Charles Carroll Glover, to the 1900 Paris Exposition, while The Dew was bought at the fair by Georges Leygues, the French minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, possibly on behalf of the Ministry of Fine Arts.32 Evans valued The Perfume of Roses enough to include it in his gift of prized artworks to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1909.33 In offering a conservative reaction to the emergence of feminist ideals in Europe and North America during the 1890s and early 1900s, these works satisfied a nostalgic demand among collectors and institutions for an ideal of a passive, fertile femininity. A Rose in Bloom In Curran’s The Scent of the Rose, the rose fragrance permeating the air, suggested by the violet smoky haze spiraling out of the thurible held by the fairy, implies feminine fecundity, with the musky roses and their violet vapor evoking the visual equivalent of an attar of roses with a violet sillage. Like a mystic form of sexual consummation, scent wafts out from the censer toward the luminous, radiant bloom opposite, to mingle among its yellow, pollen-smeared stamens. Since a single flower contains both male and female reproductive organs, it is interesting to note the way in which Curran genders these two voluminous white blooms. While the stamens of the flower on the far right suggest a male gendering, the visual emphasis on the fairy indicates the left-hand bloom as female. Moreover, the censer that she holds is spherical in shape and might be likened to the flower’s ovary that, when fertilized, will mature into a rosehip, packed

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with ripening seed. The fairy-woman is visually associated with the thurible, to which her clasp, her gaze, and her deluge of long black hair, streaming down to her lap, connect her. She holds the censer in front of her, in line with her womb, drawing a clear connection between her reproductive organs and the female parts of the flower. Moreover, her erotic sensuality, her heat, is suggested by the jets of flame spurting from her thurible/womb and the reddish glow that they cast upon her body. Sexually speaking, she is ablaze. In her book Bloom, Amy M. King traces the broad popularization of Linnaeus’s system for the gendering of floral parts, revealing the impact of this widespread legibility of the sexuality of flowers upon the Victorian literary imagination. She demonstrates the pervasiveness of the metaphor of feminine “bloom” in nineteenth-century novels, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Rose in Bloom (1876), a novel about the coming of age of a Boston society debutante.34 In Curran’s The Scent of the Rose the “bloom” metaphor likewise works to emphasize the sexual promise and attractiveness of the nubile female figure. Indeed, cupped by petals, the female figure (a bloom among blooms) is, quite literally, in bloom. The metaphor of female bloom was often associated in literature with the historic symbolism of the rose as female genitalia and with ideas about the erotic potential of scent. Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) offers a case in point. In a seduction scene, Bazarov, a young doctor, joins Fenichka, the housekeeper and mother of Nikolai’s child, as she sits on a bench arranging red and white roses into a bouquet. The beauty of this restless, dreamy, and languorous girl is likened to that of the roses she sorts. She is approaching her zenith for, as Turgenev explains, “there is a period in the life of young women when they suddenly begin to expand and blossom like summer roses; such a time had come for Fenichka.”35 During their flirtatious exchange, Bazarov requests payment for medical services but states that he does not require money, leaving her to guess how he would like to be paid. Eventually he tells her he will settle for one of her red roses, suggestively described as “still wet with dew.”36 As she leans forward to inhale its “wonderful scent,” he kisses her, and the moment is described in sensuous detail: “Fenichka stretched her little neck forward and put her face close to the flower. . . . The kerchief slipped from her hair on to her shoulders, disclosing a soft mass of black shining and slightly ruffled hair. ‘Wait a moment; I want to smell it with you,’ said Bazarov; he bent down and kissed her vigorously on her parted lips. She shuddered, pushed him back with both her hands on his breast, but pushed weakly, so that he was able to renew and prolong his kiss.”37 In this scene, “the wonderful scent” incites her arousal and is suggestive of her own blossoming sexuality, while Turgenev’s image of Bazarov watching Fenichka smell a rose evokes male fantasies of lesbian sex. Conflations of human and floral sexuality were as common in the visual arts as King has demonstrated them to be in literature. For example, the English Post-Pre-Raphaelite painter Waterhouse maintained a “longstanding association

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of women with the beauty, simplicity and decay of flowers,” which was conveyed in a recurring motif of flower-women, as Peter Trippi has observed.38 In Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose (1908; see fig. 53), the lure of the female figure to the fragrance of the flower mirrors the enticement of insects to scented petals. This metaphor of attraction is reinforced in his Summer of 1882 (now destroyed), in which butterflies appear to be drawn as much to the female figure as to the flowers around her—just as they are in Millais’s The Blind Girl (see fig. 42), Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia (see fig. 17), and Sandys’s Gentle Spring. As sociologists Gale Largey and Peter Watson have suggested, the rose acts as a symbol of attraction because we are drawn to its smell and invite others to admire its aroma.39 By alluding to ideas about scent and pollination, such paintings can evoke female sexual allure and fertility. They contrast with stock images, found in cartoons such as those published in Punch, of the mannish and androgynous “New Woman” for whom both heterosexual intercourse and childbirth were neither necessary nor desirable.40 Yet despite the eroticization of the female nude, for which Waterhouse has been critiqued in recent times, The Soul of the Rose was informed by the work of contemporary female artists and might reflect and promote contemporary challenges to conventional gender roles to a greater degree than it at first appears. Scented Passions The Soul of the Rose can be read as an aesthetic response to the erotic olfactory imagination (fig. 53).41 In this painting, an auburn-haired beauty is depicted leaning against a garden wall and drinking in the scent of a Turkish damask rose, which she presses to her face. Her thick, elongated Pre-Raphaelite neck is extended, stretched out to reach the flower, and every muscle of her body is strained to the act of smelling. She tilts the flower toward herself, and her lips caress its petals with tender passion, suggesting a fusion of olfactory and gustatory pleasure. However, the conjunction of nose and petal provides the compositional focus, making the painting primarily about the act of smelling and the effect of odor upon body and mind. By collapsing the space between the petals and the sweeping profile of her long, aquiline nose, the direct passage of the inhaled scent into the female body is visually suggested. The figure’s eyes are closed, suggesting total concentration upon this one sensory impression, and her left hand clutches the wall as if for support as the heady perfume makes its intoxicating effect. Waterhouse’s painting presents a fascinating depiction of a woman in the throes of a passionate scented vision, which is visually implied but not directly rendered. It reflects a contemporary awareness of the poignancy of smell for raising sentimental visions and emotional memories, which, as we have seen, was present both in the literature of the period and in psychological research. In

Fig. 53  John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose, 1908. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 61 cm. Private collection. Photo by courtesy of Julian Hartnoll / Bridgeman Images.

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this context, one can suppose that the scent has stimulated her desire, perhaps raising before her closed eyes the image of a lover. The rose-covered wall, then, becomes the space onto which her scent-fueled imagination projects their form. Her pose supports this reading, inviting the speculation that, while clutching the garden wall, she imagines leaning upon him or her, her palm flat against their chest. We might infer that the bloom, pressed so sensuously against her mouth, has in her mind taken on the form of her lover’s lips. Certainly, the power of rose scent to arouse the image of a loved one was proverbial. As early as 1868, a writer on the senses for the popular Penny Illustrated Paper had mused: “Who cannot recall mingling with the perfume of some favourite flower the still more subtle scent of those glossy tresses, the delicate touch of that dainty hand as it held the bloom? Alone with a rose for fifteen seconds, a man might be a fool to all his senses, and, with his arm, in imagination, round some slim, rounded waist, his eyes looking for a miniature of himself in those mirrors that look back at him, his ears waiting for a whispered word, his lips—well never mind.”42 The painting calls to mind a passage in the romance The Life Everlasting (1911) by the novelist Marie Corelli, a vocal opponent of women’s suffrage. In it, a red rose, like a rescuing knight, “clambers” up the turret in which the heroine is imprisoned to reach her as she looks out of her “lofty window,” its opening petals lifting toward her like “sweet lips turned up for kisses.”43 Arguably, Waterhouse invites his male viewer to imagine the woman’s lover as female—with the rose metaphor, as in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, evoking titillating thoughts of a lesbian embrace—with the male viewer looking on, imagining himself smelling the woman as she “smells a rose.” Either way, Waterhouse’s painting suggests a vision—a memory or sexual fantasy—inspired by the scent of the rose. In The Soul of the Rose, we can also read the rose bush and wall as a reflection of the female figure, since clear comparisons are drawn between rose and woman, which are pressed together like a mirror image. Her cheeks are suffused with a warm roseate flush, which ricochets from the bloom pressed against her face, while her patterned green Turkish-style robe seems to replicate the tones and undulating forms of the Turkish rose bush, which dresses the body of the wall. In this way, her amorousness might even be read as self-directed; hence the act of smelling flowers could be understood as an autoerotic act, particularly when one considers the rose/vagina metaphor and the painting’s alternative title of My Sweet Rose.44 Indeed, if we interpret the act of touching and smelling the rose while fantasizing about a lover as having masturbatory overtones, the implications of perversity are heightened by the Victorian/Edwardian suggestion of “self-harming” as the woman presses her palm against the thorny stem of the rose bush. In any case, scent is undoubtedly posited as an erotic entity and a sexual stimulus, suggestive of polymorphous pleasures. Indeed, while images of smelling roses within an enclosed garden space reinforce the traditional constraints of female domesticity, the insinuation of a solitary woman attending to her own

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sexual desires might equally be suggestive and supportive of the contemporary challenges to prevailing attitudes to sexual relations made by the New Woman and her male supporters. Scent and Sexology Given the title’s allusion to a line from Tennyson’s Maud (1855), “And the Soul of the Rose went into my blood,” Waterhouse’s painting would seem to reflect both popular and scientific interest in the bodily effects of scent, as well as the affinity of smell with mood and memory. The poem Maud describes the musings of a man lamenting lost opportunities to win the woman he loves. As he pines in a rose garden, “woodbine spices are wafted abroad / And the musk of the rose is blown.”45 As Debra Mancoff explains in Flora Symbolica: Flowers in Pre-Raphaelite Art (2003), Waterhouse’s painting also expresses this sense of yearning; in it, the female figure “is flushed and her expression is pensive, as if the fragrance has summoned a memory that brings both pain and pleasure.”46 By matching the hue of the figure’s flushed physicality to that of the rose against her cheek, the idea of pleasure aroused and even consummated through the act of smelling is visually conveyed. The painting evokes much the same sentiment as the article on “Flower Odors,” which described how perfumes “knock on the heartdoors of memory” and hence “fire the eye or blanch the cheek” or cause one to “blush and smile.”47 This connection between the “soul” or scent of the rose and the stimulatory action of odor upon the bloodstream and heart rate is made explicit in Corelli’s The Life Everlasting as the heroine bends her face over the rose against her breast to inhale its “delicious, soft and penetrating scent” and “half unconsciously” kisses its “velvet petals.” “And so for a while we made silent friends with each other till I might have said with the poet—‘the soul of the rose went into my blood.’ At any rate something keen, fine and subtle stole over my senses, moving me to an intense delight in merely being alive . . . I forgot everything except that I lived and life was ecstasy!”48 In Corelli’s literature and Waterhouse’s art, scent is a drug with an intensely erotic charge. From the 1880s to the early 1900s, there was considerable physiological interest in the effects of odor stimulation and tranquilization, both sexual and nonsexual. In his Essays on Health-Culture (translated 1887), the German physician and hygienist Jaeger wrote of his experiments measuring the impact of different scents upon the nervous system, using a chronometer. Light, fresh, and wholesome floral scents, he argued, have a stimulating effect upon the body and mind, while heavy and oppressive odors make the heartbeat sluggish, causing lethargy. In language reminiscent of that used by hostile critics to describe Rossetti’s fragrant “stunners,” he suggested how, on inhaling “penetrating” scents, “the limbs feel heavy, as if fatigued; the breathing is more difficult . . .

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the flesh becomes soft; the body is distended; the heart beat[s] more quickly and less regularly; the mood is depressed. In other words, such concentrated matters induce feelings of weariness, weakness, languor and depression; and if the degree of concentration be intensified to a certain point, death will result.”49 That same year, Charles Samson Féré, chief medical officer at the Paris asylum Hospice de Bicêtre and former assistant to the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, concluded that odors could induce “sensorial intoxication,” leading to heightened visual acuity and general bodily excitation.50 His work was developed by Benjamin Ward Richardson, a London anesthetist and specialist in the bodily effects of chemical stimuli, who in 1891 outlined the need for enhanced understanding of the “direct action of odors on the nervous system.” He urged an investigation into why different odors cause drowsiness, wakefulness, or even nightmares in some people.51 Five years later, T. E. Shields, a student at Johns Hopkins University, published findings from his thesis on “The Effect of Odours, Irritant Vapors, and Mental Work upon the Blood Flow” in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. He suggested that pleasant olfactory sensations led to a reduction in the volume of blood supplied to the arm, owing to an acceleration of the heart rate and a simultaneous increase in the supply of blood to the brain.52 Sweet scents, it seemed, could cause head rush and a pounding heart. This research was closely associated with experiments undertaken into the reciprocal relationship between the nose and the genitals, including “nose to body” reflexes such as scent-stimulated sexual arousal, as well as “body to nose” reflexes such as orgasmic convulsions induced by sneezing.53 Thus, for example, in 1898 Ephraim Cutter referred readers of the Journal of the American Medical Association to studies made some thirty years earlier into the action of the scents of cologne, rose, camphor, and the fumes of ammonia and sulfur upon the “erectile turgescence” of the nasal mucous membrane. Cutter, a New York physician known for his broad-ranging contributions to medical literature, claimed to have discovered in 1866 that “just a few whiffs . . . of any of these odors increased the blood flow” to the nose. This, he claimed, immediately produced “a livid injection and turgescence of the erectile tissues” on the “turbinated bones of the nose” that stood out as clearly “as the erection of an excited turkey cock.”54 The sexualized language here points to a connection commonly made in the late nineteenth century not only between blood flow to the nose and the genitals but also to scent as sexual stimulus. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, smell-induced arousal remained controversial (for example, it imbued Huysmans’s writings with their notoriously risqué edge and furnished Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time [1908] with titillating case studies), but the concept was familiar nonetheless.55 Later, Freud coined a word for sexual arousal through olfactory stimulation as a form of neurosis—osphresiolagnia.

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Wicked with Roses The Soul of the Rose echoes sentiments expressed by sexologists in this period about the properties of odor and color as an aphrodisiac. Havelock Ellis broached the nineteenth-century tradition of associating female sexuality with floral scent in Sexual Selection in Man. He argued that “it is really the case that in many persons—usually, if not exclusively, women—the odor of flowers produces not only a highly pleasurable, but a distinctly and specifically sexual, effect.”56 Citing the case of a “lady living in India” for whom roses had little effect and who was only aroused by the more “penetrating, heavier scents of lilies, tuberose and gardenia,” he inferred that while sensitive English women might be aroused by delicate scents, Eastern women (or Western women acclimatized to Eastern living) required more potent olfactory stimuli. In 1905, the German sexologist Bloch noted the “awakening of libido sexualis in women by the smelling of a bouquet of flowers.” He quotes The Psychology of Love (1875) by the Italian physiologist and pioneer of sexual medicine Paolo Mantegazza to demonstrate the effect of scent stimulation upon “sensitive” women and the resemblance between the facial expressions of a woman when smelling a flower and when experiencing orgasm: “Make the chastest woman smell the flowers she likes best . . . and she will shut her eyes, breathe deeply, and if very sensitive tremble all over, presenting an intimate picture which otherwise she never shows, except perhaps to her lover.”57 This notion of women’s susceptibility to the erotics of scent surely goes a long way toward accounting for the popularity of floral “scented visions” in the art of the period. They are intimate pictures, with the viewer cast in the role of the imagined lover, smelling the woman in the act of smelling. While enjoyed by the “chastest women,” solitary inhalation was imagined to have clear aberrant overtones. Bloch cites a lady who claimed, “I sometimes feel such pleasure in smelling flowers that I seem to be committing a sin.”58 By the 1900s, ideas about the “sin” of scent arousal and its effects on women had been in circulation for decades. As early as 1851, an article in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology described the effect of female body odors upon heterosexual males as a necessary and healthy part of the reproductive process. Floral scents, however, were a luxury for women “that in some constitutions cannot be indulged without some danger to the morals, by the excitement of the ovaria which results. And although less potent as aphrodisiacs in their action on the sexual system of women than of men, we have reason to think they cannot be used to excess with impunity by most.”59 While heterosexual males were thought to be attracted to female body odors and women’s perfumes, prompting arousal, copulation, and the propagation of the human race, some women were thought to have a strong sexual attraction to floral fragrance, here described in masturbatory rather than reproductive terms. This displaced female sexual attraction from the odor of men to the scent of flowers held an

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erotic appeal, due to its suggestion of something intimate and contrary to the natural order, from which men were excluded but could nevertheless watch or imagine. Such ideas held roots in the mid-Victorian period. One is reminded of the voracity with which Ellen Terry smells the camellia in Choosing (see fig. 5)—a painting that Waterhouse surely knew and held in mind, since it was shown at the G. F. Watts retrospective, held at the Royal Academy in 1905. One might also think of the conservatory scene in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860, four years prior to Watts’s painting). In the novel, Stephen and Maggie’s passion reaches such a rapturous intensity that Maggie, conscious of Stephen’s gaze and her own turbulent emotions, rejects his advances, repressing her feelings out of respect for her childhood sweetheart Philip and her cousin Lucy. “She blushed deeply, turned away her head, and drew her arm from Stephen’s, going up to some flowers to smell them . . . ‘Oh, may I get this rose?’ said Maggie . . . ‘I think I am quite wicked with roses; I like to gather them and smell them till they have no scent left.’” 60 As Stephen showers Maggie’s arms with kisses, the rose becomes a distraction upon which she lavishes her displaced passions until, “quivering with rage and humiliation,” she orders him to leave.61 By spurning Stephen and devouring the scent of the rose instead, Maggie rejects productive sexual activity—in contrast to Fenichka, in Fathers and Sons, who is sexually compromised when she allows herself to be kissed as she smells the rose. In a “quivering” rage, Maggie is shown to be in a near-hysterical state; the scent that she breathes so deeply excites rather than calms her nerves, leaving her “trembling and panting.”62 It is as if by experiencing the frustrations of sexual continence Maggie is left susceptible to the arousing potential of scent. In a scene in which Maggie is “quite wicked with roses,” smell, as the basest sense, serves as the sign and agent of her sexuality and of its illicit nature.63 The Morality of Perfumes In Choosing (see fig. 5), The Mill on the Floss, and The Soul of the Rose (see fig. 53), the female figure flouts codes of propriety by failing to smell flowers in moderation. Middle-class women were also expected to show restraint when choosing and applying perfumes, with perfume etiquette dictating that they restrict themselves to delicate, refreshing scents (eau de cologne, bergamot, lemon oil, English lavender, or violet water). In Common Scents (2004), Janice Carlisle argues that in mid-Victorian literature, “the artificiality of perfume marks the women who are unfit to be wives of the respectable men of these stories, while flowers, whose subtle scents recall nature in its most refined forms, identify those women who should and do become proper mates.”64 In Britain, the white middle class identified itself with olfactory neutrality (understood as soaped skin, fresh breath, and a light fragrance) to distinguish itself from “the other”—the decadent

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musky perfumes of the aristocracy, the stench of the unwashed, the cheap violetscented toilet waters worn by working-class women, and the perceived foul breath and nauseous body odors of foreigners. Yet, while mild, simple scents were considered the ideal, the fact is that Victorian middle-class women favored headier scents. Queen Victoria, model of middle-class decorum, wore Creed’s Fleurs de Bulgarie (1845), a Bulgarian rose with musk, ambergris, and bergamot, and by the late nineteenth century, new and daring perfumes, such as Grossmith’s Phul-Nana (1891), a complex “Oriental” with thirteen extracts (bergamot, orange, neroli, geranium, tuberose, ylang-ylang, patchouli, benzoin, cedar, sandalwood, opoponax, tonka bean, and vanilla), had captured the market. Ideas about the etiquette of perfume—its use and abuse—were colored by middle-class perceptions of class and moral behavior.65 Musk was widely associated with French decadence, including the corruption of the ancien régime and the now-dated tastes of Empress Josephine. At the same time, it was associated with women of ill repute, including actresses, models, and prostitutes. In his article “The Education of the Sense of Smell” (1898), A. L. Benedict, professor of Physiology and Digestive Diseases in the Dental Department of the University of Buffalo, described perfume as “a very fair index of social status”: “I must confess that I cannot always distinguish a lady from a ‘loidy’ by the dress and must often rely on the odor of the perfume. Musk we naturally associate with bleached hair and a stained character.”66 Cosmopolitan magazine in 1898 even went so far as to offer a “system” for reading character traits based upon the individual’s perfume choice. “Given knowledge of the odor preferences of an individual, I will guarantee to tell with almost absolute accuracy his or her leading mental and moral habits,” proclaimed Harry Thurston Peck, Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University, in his article “The Morality of Perfumes.” Perfume, he suggested, spoke volumes, being more “intensely personal than any other habit or taste that can be found.”67 Echoing the Victorian lexicon of physiognomy, Peck maintained that a woman’s proclivity for pure musk would indicate “a strongly animal, unrefined and almost brutal nature,” while a taste for delicate scents such as lily of the valley, crab apple blossoms, new-mown hay, geranium, or orris (iris root) implied “refinement, good taste, natural purity of character and a love of the beautiful.” Those preferring the “heavy, sweet and somewhat sickening white rose class of perfumes” would display “a great deal of superficiality and rather obtrusive affection” while proving “to be insincere, utterly untrustworthy, and both a physical and moral coward.”68 This included wearers of Vetiver (licorice-like), Chypre (bergamot and oakmoss), and Peau d’Espagne (leather steeped in a heady mix of rose, neroli, sandalwood, lavender, verbena, bergamot, cloves, and cinnamon, and smeared in musk and civet), who would prove “indolent, sentimental, flabby both mentally and morally and with a tendency to fat.” In contrast, those with a preference for eau de cologne exhibited “taste and refinement,” were “clear

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and sane,” and could be trusted for their “great purity and nobility.” Devotees of White Iris, Millefleurs, Goya Lily, Parfait Amour, and Opoponax would “not stand much temptation,” while a taste for Papier de l’Orient denoted “degeneracy . . . without redeeming qualities.”69 The article, seemingly tongue-in-cheek, was slammed by the Kansas City Journal as “a great joke.”70 Yet despite the phony psychology and lack of true perfume connoisseurship, we can see that, for Peck, light scents such as crab apple blossoms are posited as attracting refined sensibilities, while deep, heavy scents correspond with reprobate personalities. Naturals such as lily of the valley, geranium, and orris (iris root) suggest positive character traits—as does the scent of new-mown hay. (Peck may not have known that the latter was reproduced by the synthetic coumarin, since the use of chemical compounds was a well-kept industry secret.) Conversely, modern perfumes, with complex formulas of multiple ingredients (e.g., Vetiver, Chypre, Millefleurs, Goya Lily, and Parfait Amour) convey the character flaws of complex women.71 The link between animalics (musk and civet) with “a brutal nature” is clear, and by associating the heady, narcotic, spicy scents of Papier de l’Orient with degeneracy, Peck upheld the traditional Orientalist agenda, in which the imagined Orient is associated with backwardness, idleness, and deceit. In short, the prevailing ideal of white, middle-class femininity demanded delicacy in both the act of smelling and the application of perfume. The Smell of Class If Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose (see fig. 53) suggests passion through the depiction of insatiable smelling, then his earlier painting A Flower Market, Old Rome (1886) reveals class variance with regard to female sensitivity to scent. In the painting, a young Roman lady, elegantly dressed and holding a fan, leans across a market stall to dreamily smell the roses, while a scantily and shabbily clad flower seller leans against the wall as if for support, dizzied, we might suppose, by the heat and the overpowering scent. While the lady’s graceful posture suggests pleasure in moderation, the stallholder (seemingly, a Victorian Covent Garden working-class flower girl in a toga) is shown as hypersensitive to smell, in line with Victorian perceptions about the supposedly “animal-like” working-class sense of smell. This depiction, however, contrasts with contemporary accounts of hyperesthesia, which typically focused on middle-class creatives—such as Miss Goddard, Mrs. Haweis, and Rose Kingsley. Working-class identity was also, seemingly, a feature of Waterhouse’s The Shrine (1895; fig. 54). Reporting on The New Gallery’s summer exhibition of 1895, a critic for the Athenaeum observed that the figure of the young girl stooping to smell a jug of roses appears “by no means of a high or fine type” and “rather sensual and not so pure as she ought to be.”72 As with The Soul of the Rose, the viewer assumes the role of voyeur of a private and intimate moment. Though succumbing to the pleasures of scent,

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Fig. 54  John William Waterhouse, The Shrine, 1895. Oil on canvas, 88 × 42 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christopher Wood Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

the girl’s posture suggests her readiness to spring apart from the flowers should she be disturbed; this imbues the picture with a sense of surreptitious pleasure. The scene is crying out for someone to come around the corner and catch her in the act. At the top of the steps, the newcomer would have the moral high ground, looking down upon the girl. Perhaps it was this sense of transgression that led the critic to comment on her physiognomy, noting the difficulty of reconciling the inviolability of a shrine with the vulgar, animal gesture of smelling and finding it an act “quite out of keeping with the subject.”73 Nevertheless, while Curran and Waterhouse’s perfumed pictures explore themes of erotic sensuality and earthly pleasure, the historical association of scent with spirituality and the soul also underpins these works.74

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Portal to the Soul “No sense is more closely connected with the sphere of soul than the sense of smell.”75 This nexus between scent and soul, so eloquently described by Macmillan, was powerfully evoked in Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose (see fig. 53). The female figure can be seen as the visual embodiment of the flower’s scent/soul, her inner purity symbolized by her beauty and the pearls in her hair. The title also evokes the most exquisite of attar of roses, Ruh Gulab, which is produced by distilling pure Damascus rose oil many times over to increase its concentration. (Ruh in Arabic means “soul,” while in Farsi, gul is “flower” and ab is “water.”) Thus, The Soul of the Rose, like Macdonald’s The Three Perfumes (see fig. 24) and Curran’s fairy fantasias, might represent a visual metaphor for perfume. The Birmingham artist Emma Barton had previously explored these ideas in her photograph The Soul of the Rose of 1905 (fig. 55). Exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society in London three years before Waterhouse’s painting was completed, and two years after she rose to fame as one of the leading “pictorial photographers” of the day, it shows a woman in tartan dress bending over to breathe in the scent of a rose. The arch of her back, bow of her head, and crook of her arm gripping the rose stem create a circular effect that echoes the swirl of the rose petals, so that she herself becomes the visual embodiment of the rose. The deliberateness and discomfort of this pose conveys deep concentration. It is as if the scent acts as a pseudo-magical portal between the external world and the inner self—to both the soul of the flower and to the soul of the woman.76 Like Fortescue-Brickdale’s The Lover’s World (see fig. 46), both Barton and Waterhouse’s versions of The Soul of the Rose evoke a sense of natural magic. (Indeed, Waterhouse returned to the motif of a woman smelling a rose in The Enchanted Garden [ca. 1916]—a painting that also looks back to the work of a female artist: Marie Spartali Stillman’s The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo of 1889.) Moreover, in Waterhouse’s painting, the rose, the traditional symbol of the Virgin Mary, grows up the walls of what appears to be an Italianate cloistered space. It suggests a convent or other place conducive to meditation and spiritual growth. Indeed, the garden itself might be seen as a visual metaphor for the soul, just as the hortus conclusus (Latin for “enclosed garden”) in early Renaissance Annunciation imagery stands for the Virgin’s purity. As art historian John Christian observed, the female figure in Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose connects with the girl desired by the pilgrim in Chaucer’s English adaptation of the thirteenth-century French poem “Le Roman de la Rose,” an allegory of courtly love by Guillaume de Lorris.77 In this euphemistic story, the narrator embarks in his dream on a pilgrimage with Cupid, the god of love. On the journey, the young man discovers the walled Garden of Pleasure, where a beautiful woman personifying idleness greets him. Lured by the scent of a rose and persuaded by a “lusty fellow” to climb into the garden, he

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Fig. 55  Emma Barton, The Soul of the Rose, 1905. Photograph. © Royal Photographic Society Collection / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

endeavors to pick a bloom—the flower representing his ideal mate. As he does so, Cupid shoots him with arrows, leaving him hopelessly enamored with the rose. As in Waterhouse’s painting, with its polymorphous symbolism, the rose becomes a mutable symbol, variously standing for the woman, her sexual organs, her virginity, and her love. The poem had previously been treated by Waterhouse’s early source of inspiration, Burne-Jones, who had read and savored Chaucer as a student at Oxford. Both his oil The Heart of the Rose (1889) as well as Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose (fig. 56)—a wool and silk tapestry designed by Burne-Jones around 1890 and woven by Morris & Co. in 1901—depict the rose personified as a young girl. In the Morris & Co. tapestry, the pilgrim is lured to the flower by its beauty and scent, and we see him reach out to touch it—a rare Victorian example of a heterosexual (if androgynous) male figure shown as susceptible to scent. The rose has a disembodied female head at its center, and the metaphorical,

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Fig. 56  Edward Burne-Jones, Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose, 1901. William Morris & Co., wool and silk tapestry on cotton warp, 150 × 201 cm. Courtesy of Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe. Photo: Thomas Goldschmidt.

sexual implications of smelling or touching a rose are once again implicit. A woman to be felt, this is also a goddess of perfect love—the muse or spirit of the rose. Shown in profile, eyes closed and head tilted, to emphasize the nose pressed against the petals, she appears lost in scent. As in Barton’s photograph, scent operates in Waterhouse’s painting as the portal to the soul of the rose, prompted by the female figure’s gesture of smelling. At the same time, we see her located within “the soul of the rose,” which is visualized as a walled garden. Viewers drawn to the painting and to her beauty may imagine themselves in the role of the pilgrim, smelling a rose and transported in reverie into her world. In contrast, the Morris & Co. tapestry (like Margaret Macdonald’s gesso panel The Heart of the Rose of 1902) bypasses the depiction of smelling, taking the viewer/pilgrim directly to that sacred, mystic realm. Here, the lilies (added later by John Dearle, chief designer of Morris &

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Co. after Morris’s death in 1896) serve as a reminder that scented reverie is the medium through which the heart and soul of the rose is reached. The conflation of scent, sexuality, and soul in these works is best understood through the idea of floral scents as offering, in Macmillan’s words, “an important means of communication with heaven and a direct avenue for the soul’s approach to the Father of Spirits.”78 Just as Teresa of Ávila was transfixed by the angel’s dart of divine love, the rapture of the female protagonist in The Soul of the Rose might be read as being due to the penetration of the scent, or divine soul, of the rose as it is inhaled into the body. In Waterhouse’s paintings, erotic excitement and spiritual ecstasy are aligned, and the transgressive nature of nineteenth-century sexuality finds transcendence through the imagery of women smelling flowers and breathing floral-scented air—just as Solomon’s imagery of priests and acolytes smelling incense surmounted the perceived Victorian indecency of male-on-male sex to express a form of pure, divine love. For the art writer Rose Sketchley, the spiritual was key to Waterhouse’s work. In her survey of Waterhouse’s oeuvre for the Art Journal—an assessment so insightful as to suggest close consultation with the artist—she observes of The Shrine: “in its poetry of fair colour, form and arrangement, art such as this has a ministry that reaches beyond sense,” enabling the attainment of a “final fulfilment beyond—say, rather through, the visible ends of the world.”79

Chapter 8

Death by Perfume

Are they waves of gentle airs? Are they waves of wondrous sounds? How they swell, whirl around me, shall I breathe, shall I listen? Shall I drink them, dive beneath? Sweetly in aromas expire? —Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, 1859

If scent could suggest the spiritual in art, it could also evoke earthly ideas of luxury, pleasure, perversity, and decay. Themes of olfactory indulgence and perfumed intoxication recurred in late nineteenth-century art and literature with particular reference to fragrant asphyxiation, floral narcosis, perfumed frenzy, and incense trance. Images of women incapacitated by the soporific effects of scent tapped into an international vogue for pictures of lethargic, sleeping, dying, and dead women—and, like Curran and Waterhouse’s erotic fantasies of women as submissive flowers, these were reassuring for the male viewer at a time when Western women were challenging passivity.1 At the same time, olfactory indulgence could signal homoerotic pleasures, as in Helen Thornycroft’s watercolor Narcissus of 1876, in which the vain youth wallows in a meadow, his nostrils flared as he enjoys his namesake flower (fig. 57). Thornycroft was the sister of the sculptor William Hamo Thornycroft and friends with his lover, the writer, critic, and olfactif Edmund Gosse. The painting would appeal to the men in her circle who belonged to that class of “urban sophisticates, dandies, bohemians, and male aesthetes and decadents” who, as literary historian Catherine Maxwell explains, were “keenly interested in scent and enjoyed deploying it in different ways.”2 Alma-Tadema’s painting The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) takes as its subject a banquet at which the Syrian-born Roman emperor and high priest of the sun god smothered his guests with an avalanche of flowers dropped from a reversible

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Fig. 57  Helen Thornycroft, Narcissus, 1876. Watercolor on paper, 26.7 × 32.4 cm. Photo © Mallett Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

ceiling (fig. 58).3 Inspired by a surviving Roman text, the Scriptores historiae Augustae (an 1857 German translation of which Alma-Tadema owned), the painting depicts clusters of fluttering, falling rose petals, borne softly downward upon a current of air, or momentarily whipped upward again by an updraft before swiveling down to earth to settle upon an ever-mounding heap. As the petals flutter through the air, they form a fragrance trail, which snakes through the painting, giving scent a visible, tangible form—their intense pink color seeming to prompt a visual saturation and overflow into the olfactory sense. Once fallen, they form a petal bath. On seeing the painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1888, the critic for the Magazine of Art observed the liquid quality of the petals, “poured down from the velarium.” Entertained from his couch, the reclining emperor watches, taking pleasure in “deluging” his guests and watching this “pell-mell heap,” this “weltering mass of struggling forms flounder in the sea of roses.”4 Likewise, the critic for the Morning Post found “a vision of strong men battling might and main with the crimson tide,” observing that “here and there are to be seen the faces of beautiful girls gasping for breath amidst the overwhelming affluence of flowers.”5

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Fig. 58  Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888. Oil on canvas, 132.7 × 214.4 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

On seeing the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1888, Frederic Farrar, the ever-conservative archdeacon of Westminster, was sickened by the painting, which he described in Good Words as depicting an “avalanche of . . . sickening, crumpled, decaying blossoms for vile purposes vilely abused” and a “carnival of bejewelled sensualism . . . portent of abysmal depravity.”6 The art critic for The Independent condemned it as feting “the wild whims of that monster of debauchery.”7 Others observed the cruel deceptiveness of beauty in the scene. The degenerate tyrant and his courtiers are shown lounging on a couch, gazing down on the scene with, as the Newcastle Courant observed, “evident enjoyment of the asphyxiation of their boon companions.”8 Hyperbolic and sensationalist language dominated the critical responses to the painting, with their focus on the perceived sensual wantonness of the spectacle. While rose scent could convey both the sensual and the spiritual, in excess, as in The Roses of Heliogabalus, it became the scent of debauchery. The painting imparts a strange, unsettling tension. The beauty of the roses and their scent, the women, the exquisite marble, and the azure sky contrast with the threat of smothering and asphyxiation.9 As a writer for the Evening Telegraph later noted in 1901, the subject—murder—is “not altogether in sympathy with the scent of the roses.”10 Penelope, author of “The Ladies’ Column” in Exeter’s Western Times, described this tension. On visiting the painting in the

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artist’s studio in 1888, she felt moved to cite Alexander Pope’s line, “Die of a rose in aromatic pain,” only to be told by Alma-Tadema, “No, no, they are not dead at all, nor dying; only luxuriating.” Like Heliogabalus, she suggested, the artist seems “fond of a joke,” with the viewer presented with an uncomfortable spectacle, unable to tell if the guests are frolicking or in peril.11 The ambiguity of appearances was also sensed by a writer for the Bristol Mercury who described the “cataract of roses” descending on the guests, and by a writer for The Aberdeen Journal who noted that “some of what may be called the eye effects are very admirable—that is the face that is buried all but one eye. This one eye gleams brightly from between two leaves.”12 In fact, we see rather more of the half-submerged face than just one eye—but the critic has recalled the surreal sense of a visual spectacle that conceals as much as it shows. Sensory Hedonism Alma-Tadema’s oeuvre presents the hedonism of the ancients, preoccupied with the pleasures of the senses. From the 1860s until his death in 1912, he painted numerous paintings of women in Greek or Roman settings, carrying, scattering, or bending to smell flowers. In the Peristyle (1866), Flowers (1868), A Greek Woman (1869), Confidences (1869), An Oleander (1882), Caracalla (1902), and Summer Offering (1911) all show the act of smelling flowers, as do several paintings of women in contemporary settings, including Orchids (1879), In the Corner of My Studio (1893), and Spring Flowers (1911). Roses are abundant in his paintings, serving as colorful accessories or—as in A Welcome Gift (1883), A Silent Greeting (1889) and A Message of Love (1909)—as lovers’ gifts.13 In a Rose Garden (1889) depicts two girls lounging on a bench, one of whom idly shakes the branch of a rose tree so that the petals scatter over the other’s face and upper body.14 In the wall behind them, a bronze plaque depicts the making of perfume; the seeming simplicity of the ancient technique is in marked contrast to the industrial processes of the nineteenth century. Yet with The Roses of Heliogabalus Alma-Tadema made his boldest olfactory statement. His vision of Roman excess was realized at great expense: rose petals were shipped to his London studio from the French Riviera during the winter. According to the critic Penelope, John Aird, a civil engineer and Tory MP, held a banquet to celebrate his loan of the painting to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1888. Despite its being held in March, “every guest had a bouquet of roses by his side, the table was decorated with roses and a wreath of beautiful roses was placed on the head of the artist by the lady of the house, and he sat crowned with it.”15 Scent, both natural and artificial, became an expression of fin-de-siècle hedonism. In art and literature, “decadent tropes of cigarette smoke and perfume clouds” reflected this regard for heightened sensory perception.16 From Egyptian cigarettes to lilies and from tuberose to patchouli, strong scents were portrayed

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as contributing to and symptomatic of perceived problems concerning mental and moral degeneration; their effects were understood in the context of the perceived hyperstimulation of modernity and associated with disorders such as hyperesthesia. Heady scents were imagined to shatter the nerves and arouse dissipated ideas. There was, as literary historian Rindisbacher observes, “a new nervousness and olfactory explosion” in the literature of the period, such as Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), in which Des Esseintes suffers a nervous decline triggered by a study of perfumes that leaves him “swooning and half dying across the window sill.”17 Associating scent with the “fleurs du mal” of Baudelaire’s poetry and the menacing flowers of Decadent art and literature more widely, from the 1860s onward, artists also experimented with the motif of intense fragrance and its effects upon body, mind, and morality. Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus sits squarely within this context. The critic Penelope concludes that the floundering figures are “in an intoxication of luxury.” Some are “struggling to free themselves from the fragrant mass,” while others are “yielding to the languor of their overcharged senses, reposing . . . with extended white and rounded arms, in an attitude of utter abandonment.”18 For her, the painting evoked a scent-fueled inebriation, with effects akin to the paroxysms of opium taking. In art, literature, and life, the figure of the olfactif (defined by Maxwell as “the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell”) was perversely fascinating.19 From Alma-Tadema’s and Solomon’s portrayals of Heliogabalus to Huysmans’s character Des Esseintes and Solomon’s admirer Stenbock, such figures contravened olfactory etiquette, which dictated that (white, hetrosexual, middle-class) men consume mild, simple scents, such as eau de cologne. Male appreciation of scent was taboo, lending these figures their risqué air of homoerotic or perverse sexual licentiousness. As the perfumer Charles Henry Piesse put it in 1887, “a man of really refined taste of the present age would no more scent himself and his surroundings to over saturation as was the custom in ages past, than he would induce emesis to enable himself to enjoy a second repast.”20 Yet just as women wore musky perfumes in contradiction to etiquette advice, in reality, many middle-class men sported complex compositions such as Guerlain’s Jockey Club (1879)—an olfactory evocation of Epsom Downs racecourse in the spring. Despite their traditional association with the Virgin Mary, roses when depicted in excess became a popular symbol of hedonism and moral decay.21 Indeed, their cloying scent, as much as their visual and tactile qualities, encapsulated the spirit of Decadent art and literature with its wider preoccupation with sensual aesthetics, alongside certain other floral symbols of hedonism, including lilies, orchids, and sunflowers. Clearly, Alma-Tadema took a bold tack in The Roses of Heliogabalus by substituting rose petals for the violets described in Scriptores historiae Augustae. (The only violets in the painting are the two garlands beneath the imperial

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table.) Famously, in Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), a sense of intemperance and oppression pervades the novel from the opening line: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”22 Later, in Hermann Sudermann’s decadent play Roses, the first in a volume of plays entitled Streaks of Light (1902; translated from German into English in 1912), the “nasty smell of withered roses—sour—like stale tobacco smoke” is described as maddening the protagonists “as cats by valerian,” and as burning “the brains out of one’s head.” As passion turns caustic with guilt and ennui, the acrid scent intensifies, building to the play’s climax and the tragic conclusion, when the deceived husband discovers and shoots the lovers.23 Given Alma-Tadema’s hedonistic motifs—the languishing young women and floral excesses—as well as his evident preoccupation with scent, one critic, writing in The Academy in 1913, looked back at his paintings as “lilies and languor.”24 The phrase evokes the extravagances of the Aesthetic Movement as well as the sensory excess and world-weariness that characterized Victorian Decadence at the fin-de-siècle. In Britain, leading exponents of Decadence, such as the playwright Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley, delighted in being olfactifs, deploying their refined sense of smell to creative effect. Although Alma-Tadema’s Neoclassicism stood somewhat apart from the main movements of the day, his art shares themes in common with both Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence. Wilde, however, was not a fan. In a lecture of 1883, he warned his listeners that “popular archaeology painting is bad art.”25 The Perfume of the Ancients By “archaeology painting,” Wilde likely had in mind not only the art of Alma-Tadema but also the works of Godward. A protégé of Alma-Tadema’s, Godward had a long and prolific career, but by 1914 his “Victorians in togas” were out of touch with modernity; his suicide note in 1922 allegedly stated that “the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso.” One such work is The New Perfume (1914), in which Godward collapsed the ancient and the modern to reference the timelessness of perfume’s associations with the body beautiful, romance, and eroticism (fig. 59). As a classical Roman or Greek beauty dabs on her new scent, her tall, slender body, elongated in a flowing, deep-red, diaphanous robe, forms a visual parallel to the glass vial and its liquid contents—the title referring both to her recent acquisition and to her nubile status. The image of a classical woman enjoying a luxury purchase mirrors the gratification of the modern art buyer acquiring the painting. It was designed to appeal to Godward’s affluent patrons— frequenters, perhaps, of the burgeoning phenomenon of perfume emporiums located in department stores such as Selfridges in London.

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Fig. 59  John William Godward, The New Perfume, 1914. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 50.8 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

A palace of consumption, Selfridges opened its ground-floor perfume bazaar in 1910. By 1914, buyers were enticed by Gesamtkunstwerk (multimedia or “total artwork”) perfumes in seductive, crystal glass bottles, such as Caron’s Narcisse Noir (1911), Poiret’s Nuit de Chine (1913), or Le Fruit Défendu by Parfums de Rosine (1914) alongside iconic scents of the previous decade, such as Coty’s La Rose Jacqueminot (1904). On sale would have been Piver’s Pompeia (1907), which, like Godward’s painting, tapped into the era’s obsession with classical

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civilization and archaeological excavations. Ostrom imagines this patchouli and rose cologne as offering the tantalizing proposition of “the aroma inside an excavated amphora, trapped under ash for two thousand years, but containing precious elixirs.” While a dab on the wrists might conjure “a glimpse of an ancient civilisation and the past life of a wealthy woman who died tragically in the eruption,” equally Godward’s vision of a classical woman at her toilette would have evoked contemporary perfumes such as this.26 Ideas about the extravagant consumption of scent in antiquity were well rehearsed in Victorian thinking. First published in 1865, Rimmel’s The Book of Perfumes was reprinted, quoted, and liberally plagiarized throughout the nineteenth century. In it, the perfumer describes the ancient Egyptians as having “indulged” themselves in “copious ablutions” and as having “rubbed themselves all over with fragrant oils and ointments” in a manner “repulsive to English readers.”27 “The Lydians,” he wrote, “were most effeminate and . . . dripped with costly and sweet-smelling oils.”28 “Caligula,” too, he suggested, “spent enormous sums for perfumes, and plunged his body, enervated by excesses, in odiferous baths,” while Sardanapalus, the last king of Assyria, “dressed and painted like his women.”29 He “chose a death worthy of an Eastern voluptuary by causing a pile of fragrant woods to be lighted, and placing himself on it with his wives and treasures, was sweetly suffocated by aromatic smoke.”30 Couched in the contemporary nuances of words such as “indulged,” “effeminate,” “dripped,” and “enervated” and their application to cruel, mad, or homosexual leaders is an insinuation linking Western ideas of perfumed luxury to lethargy, profligacy, and waste, particularly within the context of the “Oriental Other.” Despite building his business empire out of ephemeral scent, Rimmel delights in linking perfume indulgence with the decadent evaporation of money and the degeneration and fall of earlier civilizations. Fragrance was often aligned with cruel and hedonistic ancient rulers, such as King Herod or Emperor Heliogabalus, with perfume evoking male effeteness and an ambience of cruel perversion, while at the same time evoking racial “Otherness.” Of all the perfumed tyrants of the ancient world, the story of Heliogabalus held a particular appeal for European Symbolist artists, writers, and playwrights, who looked to Alma-Tadema’s painting for inspiration. Having formal and thematic antecedents in grand Salon works such as Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and Thomas Couture’s bacchanalia, The Romans of the Decadence (1847), Alma-Tadema’s painting was in turn followed by works such as The Roses of Heliogabalus (1891) by the Austrian academic painter Leo Reiffenstein, in which girls revel in a fountain of petals. A key disseminator in Italy of British Aestheticism, Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote of his particular admiration for Alma-Tadema’s paintings, which he bracketed under the label of Pre-Raphaelitism. It seems likely that he knew of The Roses of Heliogabalus and had it in mind when he explored the theme of floral suffocation in La città morta of 1898 and again in La pisanelle ou la mort parfumée of 1899, in which

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a reformed courtesan-turned-nun is pelted to death by a shower of roses.31 This scene, in turn, was the source for the Glaswegian Symbolist Margaret Macdonald’s watercolor La mort parfumée in 1921. Meanwhile, in the play Nero of 1906, the English dramatist Stephen Phillips staged a banquet scene featuring the suffocation of Prince Britannicus under a “tempest of roses” as the grand finale, another reference to Heliogabalus and Alma-Tadema’s iconic painting.32 Floral Asphyxiation The English artist and Royal Academician John Collier also took inspiration from Alma-Tadema, with whom he had a strong relationship. As a young man, Collier’s father, the lawyer, politician, and judge Robert Collier, 1st Baron Monkswell, arranged a meeting for his son with Alma-Tadema. Although Alma-Tadema never taught Collier—who instead studied under Edward Poynter at the Slade School of Art, as well as with Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris before securing a place at the Munich Academy—he did offer the young man the opportunity to observe him at work. In testimony to this, Collier painted Alma-Tadema’s portrait in 1884 and in 1890 named his son Laurence. Given their rapport, it is interesting to note that, in 1884, four years before the exhibition of The Roses of Heliogabalus (see fig. 58), Collier also approached the theme of floral death in a playful portrait of The Daughters of Colonel Makins MP. In it he depicted “four romping daughters . . . pelting each other with primroses,” with the eldest daughter lying on the floor defeated, with almond blossoms, daffodils, and primroses scattered around her head.33 However, it was not until 1895 that Collier turned seriously to the theme of floral asphyxiation. Collier’s The Death of Albine (1895) is a response to Zola’s novel The Sin of Father Mouret of 1875, in which Albine, an innocent, uneducated village girl, fills her bed with flowers and suffocates, intoxicated under a cloud of scent. Her suicide is the result of heartbreak. Her lover, the devout curate Serge Mouret, has forsaken her. Wracked with carnal guilt and spurred by religious fervor, he has fled back to the folds of his church and his zealous Mariolatry. In a scene of frantic intensity, a hysterical Albine plunders the gardens of Paradou of all their blossoms, heaping great mounds of petals and blossoms about her room, until the bed is “completely buried . . . under hyacinths and tuberoses” and the mattress “overflows on all sides.”34 Only when the boudoir is decked with roses, violets, carnations, stocks, primroses, heliotropes, and lilies—flowers of every kind—and she has sealed her tomb, cramming aromatic herbs into “every crack” and “every hole in the door and windows,” does she arrange herself on her bed “to die with the flowers.”35 As she lies there, overcome by the penetrating fragrance, her life flashes before her nose, played out in a synesthetic opera of scent. A “prelude” of “aromatic greenery” recounts her “tomboy romps in Paradou’s wilderness,” innocent lily sings of “the first charms of her love” until

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her passion arrives with “an outburst of acrid carnation,” and heliotrope tells of “the approach of her marriage.” A “discreet trill” emanates from the petals of the mirabilis, and roses form a “swelling choir” that fanfare “the awesome movement.” In the climactic moment of la petit mort, the hyacinths and tuberoses—traditional funeral flowers that permeate Decadent poetry—“shoot out their last gasp” of perfume: she swoons and dies.36 In The Death of Albine, Collier depicts the corpse lying straight on her bed in a long white nightdress, with her bare arms crossed over her heart in eternal prayer and her feet exposed (fig. 60). She is encircled by dozens of stems of pink, red, and white roses.37 Poppies, emblems of sleep and narcosis, are scattered on her pillow, and among the roses are a few hyacinths and tuberoses; white jasmine trails to the floor.38 An early morning light rakes across her face and upper torso, indicating that we are seeing the body shortly after her nocturnal passing. While visitors to the Royal Academy in possession of the brief Academy Notes were simply informed that the heroine “died in her sleep,” those reading the more cumbersome Royal Academy Pictures learned that Albine has “laid down upon the sweet-smelling mass [of flowers] and is asphyxiated.”39 Critics commented on “the restfulness imparted to the figure of the dead” and observed that “the Reaper has but recently claimed his victim, and the sleep of death is but faintly discernible from natural repose.”40 This affinity with sleep may take inspiration from Burne-Jones’s The Legend of Briar Rose (1885–90), which Collier likely saw when it was exhibited to acclaim at Agnew’s Gallery on London’s Bond Street in 1890. The Death of Albine appears to draw from The Rose Bower, the fourth and final major panel in this series of supine enchantment, in which the slumbering sleeping beauty lies recumbent on a couch surrounded by roses, her body also stretched out from right to left. Scent and sleep were conflated in the poem Morris wrote to accompany the first panel in Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series, The Briar Wood. Here the presence of sleep in the scene takes the form of a unifying fragrance trail: “the fateful slumber floats and flows / about the tangle of the rose.” That Collier held the fairy tale and Burne-Jones’s series in mind seems likely, since in 1921 he painted Sleeping Beauty in a composition that recalls both The Death of Albine and The Briar Wood. When The Death of Albine was exhibited in 1898 at London’s Toynbee Hall, an institution committed to enriching the lives of the working class through access to culture, 40 percent of child visitors voted it their favorite work on display.41 Did they read it as the sleeping princess of the fairy tale? In addition to Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series, Collier references Millais’s celebrated Ophelia, the paradigmatic image of a suicide, surrounded by flowers and vegetation in a manner assaultive to Victorian senses. In the painting, we see the tragic Shakespearean heroine allowing herself to drown, having slipped from the willow branch into the brook, “to muddy death.” In The Death of Albine, we likewise see a succumbing to death that heightens rather than mars the

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Fig. 60  John Collier, The Death of Albine, 1895. Oil on canvas, 137.2 × 182.9 cm. Glasgow Museums, UK. Gifted by the executors of Professor William Smart, 1921. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

beauty of the corpse. It is a fin-de-siècle romanticizing of suicide in which floral asphyxiation is presented as the most passive of deaths—a spectacle of female passivity. Zola’s description of Albine’s “sweet suffocation” has something of the cruel beauty and the tumult of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus in its frenzied description of the plundering of the garden and the strewing of heaps of blooms upon the bed and around the room. In contrast, Collier’s The Death of Albine, produced two decades after the novel, is altogether more restrained, reflecting the more reserved tone of Ernest Alfred Vizetelly’s English translation of The Sin of Father Mouret. It is, as a critic for the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser described it, a “beautiful picture of purity and serene repose.”42 While the author of Academy Notes observed the sensuous qualities of the painting—“a warm light suffuses the picture and falls upon the red flowers and the yellow satin draperies of the bed”—a reviewer for the London Standard described the painting as “well painted . . . and touching,” but

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lacking the necessary display of passion to give justice to the theme.43 The latter continued: “Not Mr. Collier’s taste and not his elegance is suffice to render, in Mr Zola’s spirit, a scene which should be wrought in beating pulses, and flaming colours.”44 Far from expiring under a heap of blooms, Albine is shown ringed in by a modest garland, placed like floral tributes around a freshly dug grave. Likewise, the cherub paintings on the back wall, faintly visible through the gloom, offer little more than a nod to Zola’s visions of the Rococo raciness of Albine’s Louis XV chamber with its Boucher panels, as well as to the fleshy “Boucher’s Venuses” that Des Esseintes hallucinates upon his boudoir walls in Against Nature.45 Perhaps because of this comparative restraint, the painting was well received, gaining a wide international audience, when it was reproduced that summer in The Graphic. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in the month of Oscar Wilde’s trial, it seems to have struck an enticing balance between respectable sentimentality and perverse fascination.46 Nevertheless, the careful arrangement of flowers within this gloomy, sepulchre-like bedchamber would have invoked earlier nineteenth-century ecclesiastical controversies around flower displays in church, just as Solomon’s earlier paintings of High Church ritual had tapped into the “bells and smells” debate of the 1870s. As Janes observes, “enthusiasm for flowers implied a sinful fascination with worldly sensuality such as was supposedly characteristic of Roman Catholics.” While hard-line Protestant opinion regarded flowers as reproductive bodies, unsuited to the sacred spaces of church interiors, “all shades of Christian opinion . . . believed that their use required regulation.”47 By the late nineteenth century, this debate had abated, and opulent displays of flowers were commonplace both in the home and in church. Nevertheless, the abundance of flowers in the painting recalls these debates around the perceived sensuality of what was prejudicially termed “popery.” The perceived evils of Catholicism were a major theme within The Sin of Father Mouret, with its focus on the hypocrisy of Mouret’s fixation with the Virgin Mary and his abuse and desertion of Albine, who, aged sixteen, is little more than a child. Compared with Collier’s painting, Albert-Émile Artigue’s lithograph Woman with Roses or La mort d’Albine (1897–98) approaches more nearly the erotic abandon of the Zola passage (fig. 61). Artigue, a Buenos Aires–born and Parisbased painter and graphic designer, depicts Albine swooning as she falls back among the pink roses that bedeck her pillow. Here the expression is of orgasmic serenity. We are invited to linger over the long sweeping hair, heavy-lidded eyes, tilted neck, flared nostrils, and the glimpse of the fleshy lobe of a pearl-studded ear. The diagonal thrust of the sweeping lines creates a heightened sense of drama, while the petals, which appear to flutter from the frame, suggest the emanation of scent from the image into our own space. It is an intimate work, forming one leaf within the February 1898 issue of L’Estampe Moderne, an exquisitely colored portfolio of Art Nouveau prints that included works by Mucha, which the

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Fig. 61  Albert Artigue, Woman with Roses or La mort d’Albine, printed in L’Estampe Moderne, 1897–98. Lithograph, trimmed 41.4 × 31.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: Album / Alamy Stock Photo.

collector would peruse within the privacy of his home, peeling back the protective tissue guard to reveal the sensuous, even necrophilic image beneath.48 In a letter published in 1897, in a book entitled Odors and Perfumes: Their Influence on Reproduction, Zola expressed his interest in the erotic potential of scent as studied by physiologists such as Mantegazza in the 1870s and Cutter in the 1890s. The book’s author, the differential psychologist Dr. Étienne Tardif, had approached Zola, asking him, “Is man as easily influenced as the animals by the sensations furnished by odor, in regard to the sexual act?” He also sought Zola’s views on whether “intelligent people and simple people, peasants, city dwellers, the depraved etc” are “equally impressionable.” Moreover, did the novelist see “a rapport between the intellectual and social level of men and women and the perfume that seduces them?” Zola responded, “the sense of smell is one of the snares by which nature captures the male, in order to guarantee the propagation of the species.”49 In fact, Zola had a deep interest in the physiological and moral effects of smell, from the stinking fug of steaming laundry in L’assommoir (1877) that intoxicates the lethargic Gervaise—“her laziness . . . started by a kind of smothering caused by the dirty clothes which poisoned the air”—to the irresistible violet perfume

Fig. 62  Anaïs Beauvais, La mort d’Albine dans Le Paradou, 1880. Oil on canvas. 105.5 × 184.5 cm. Courtesy of Musée du Vieux Château, Laval. Fig. 63  Léon François Comerre, La mort d’Albine, 1882. Plate from Le Nord contemporain, no. 41 (1883). Bibliothèque municipale de Lille, portefeuille 97, 53.

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worn by the courtesan in Nana (1880).50 In preparatory notes, Zola described Nana’s “strong female odor” as “destroying everything she approaches, and turning society sour just as women having a period turn milk sour.”51 In The Belly of Paris (1873), he outlines the character La Sariette, a fruit market vendor, whose sexual readiness is echoed by the “aroma of youth which exhaled from her open baskets” of ripe cherries, plums, and strawberries, the “strong juice” of which “stained the stand . . . [and] vaporized in the heat.” The scent would arouse her and “on those sweltering July afternoons her head would spin with the powerful, musky odor of the melons” and she would bring “sudden temptation to all who saw her.” Like the brazenly underdressed flower seller in Waterhouse’s A Flower Market, Old Rome (1886), she is “in bloom,” like her produce. For Zola, “it was she—it was her arms and neck which gave that semblance of amorous vitality to her fruit.”52 Just as La Sariette’s aura ripens the fruit around her, we might also imagine Albine’s corpse quickening the bloom and decay of the flowers surrounding her. This idea of scent as primal, earthy, and fecund, which is so central to both The Belly of Paris and The Sin of Father Mouret, is salient to two French paintings of Albine that predate and may have inspired Collier’s version. In her version of La mort d’Albine of 1880, Anaïs Beauvais depicted a robust Albine with the statuesque quality of the earth goddess Ceres and the conical form of a floral cornucopia (fig. 62), while Léon François Comerre’s La mort d’Albine (exhibited at the Salon in 1882 and reproduced in the highly illustrated art and archaeology journal Le Nord contemporain in 1884), depicts a sprawling wilderness of flowers (fig. 63). Comerre places a male doctor or mourner at the scene. Seated by the deathbed, he seems impervious to the scent that has overpowered a fragile Albine, much as the Knight in Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series is untouched by the scent-slumber spell; in that sense, both works differ from Alma-Tadema’s Roses of Heliogabalus (see fig. 58), in which the art critic Penelope found the “beautiful women and stalwart men” to be “equally overcome.”53 In contrast, Lucy Hartmann’s pastel Albine, which was exhibited at the Société nationale des beaux-arts in 1899 (two years after Collier’s painting was shown at the Venice Biennale), focuses, as Bram Dijkstra has suggested, on the “macabre and erotic implications of the scene.”54 Here, the dead girl is depicted slumped on a bed of lilies, the traditional funeral flower used to mask the smell of death. Aggressive shading slashes the corpse. The motif of the scent-poisoned woman was not limited to Britain and France. A print of The Revenge of the Flowers by the Austrian painter Gustav Wertheimer (fig. 64) was featured in 1885 in La Ilustración Española y Americana, a profusely illustrated weekly art journal that circulated in Spain and Latin America, while an earlier version of this motif was published in L’illustrazione Italiana in 1877.55 The later version features an image of a young woman passed out on a couch at night, her “extended white and rounded arm” like a drug addict who has been shooting up—to reappropriate

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Fig. 64  Gustav Wertheimer, The Revenge of the Flowers. Plate from La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1885. Collection of Christina Bradstreet. Image courtesy of James Lawson Photography.

a phrase from Penelope’s description of The Roses of Heliogabalus.56 Next to the woman is an oversize vase of flowers, the blooms inclining toward her, as if morphing into the snake that mobilizes itself to strike. The engraver has used stippling to suggest fragrance particles around the flowers, the snake, and in the air above her.57 Moreover, just a year after Collier’s version was reproduced in The Graphic, the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy painted Victim of Flowers (1896). In this painting, a woman reclines on a cushion, her unkempt hair swept around her, and her eyes and mouth ambiguously half open—is she dead, or lost in ecstatic, languorous contemplation?—as long-stalked, straggling flowers sprawl menacingly over her breasts. Poppies, rudbeckias, and freesias seem to spring from her groin and shoot toward her torso. It is a floral nightmare and an invitation to fetishistic scopophilia, widely ascribed to the artist’s mental illness from syphilis, despite its close association with the uncanny body of “Albine imagery” in late nineteenth-century European Symbolism. Death by Perfume In addition to his interest in the erotic effects of scent, Zola was fascinated by the injurious potential of strong-scented flowers, a subject he first arrived at ten years prior to writing The Sin of Father Mouret, when he was working as

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a reporter for L’événement illustré. In an article published in 1865, he gave an account of a supposed English murder case, in which a woman sleeping in a closed room died in the night from the toxic emanations of an Oriental flower, which her maid had placed at her bedside.58 The motif recurs several times in Zola’s later writings. In The Sin of Father Mouret, in a scene signaling the decline of Serge and Albine’s relationship and foretelling Albine’s death, the couple are weakened by the vapors emanating from stinkweeds and other foul-smelling plants in Paradou, leading Albine to exclaim “it’s the plants that are killing us, it’s their smell.”59 The theme recurs in Zola’s novel Nana (1880), in which the narrator compares the body odors permeating the brothel to the smell of rotting bouquets, noting that “when tuberoses decay they emit a kind of human odor . . . a powerful smell [that] nearly killed” one of the patrons.60 After the publication of Nana, tales of floral asphyxiation flourished in the popular imagination. In 1881, the Shields Daily Gazette reported news from Paris of two aristocratic beauties traveling in a stagecoach, found insensible and in a near-deathlike state after a “narrow escape of being suffocated” by the garlands of flowers in their hair.61 A reporter for the Bury and Norwich Post in 1900 observed that “the inhalation of strong-scented perfumes can become a serious danger,” and referred to a “well-authenticated case” in which a death occurred after a person had remained shut up in an apartment where there was an oleander in bloom. While reassuring his readers that such tragedies were rare, the reporter observed that there were many unfortunate individuals for whom “certain flowers or their perfumes cause discomfort, and even physical suffering.” Thus, the marshmallow was believed to cause “hysterics”; “the smell of saffron fainting fits”; and the “blossoms of lobelia,” “a feeling of suffocation.”62 As late as 1909, the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser reported the case of a girl in Bromley “whose heart was so seriously affected by being in a room filled with hyacinths as to bring on fainting fits and periods of unnatural somnolence.”63 While Zola wrote the news report and The Sin of Father Mouret prior to Koch’s 1876 discovery of anthrax (a key moment in the advent of germ theory and the decline of miasma theory), Nana and the “fake news” articles came after it. Although belief in miasma as the cause of disease had been widely discredited by the 1880s and 1890s, ideas about the depressive effect of inhaling strong floral odors continued to be rehearsed in hospital hygiene manuals, family medical guides, and gardening books into the early 1900s. For example, in his book Scented Flowers and Fragrant Leaves of 1895, the horticulturalist Donald McDonald advised against the presence of flowers in sick rooms, explaining that floral odors cause “chemical decomposition of the atmosphere,” and that “breathing this vitiated air” could result in “partial asphyxia” and the “poisoning of the system.”64 Such ideas influenced both art and art criticism. Take, for example, the Birmingham Post art critic who, on reviewing Draper’s Pot Pourri of 1897 (see fig. 36), was aggrieved by the scent-poisoned atmosphere of the drawing room.65

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In The Death of Albine, exhibited the year that Scented Flowers and Fragrant Leaves was published, Collier places much of the room in deep shadow (see fig. 60). By showing the scene at a close angle, he creates a sense of claustrophobia (and thus of stifled miasmic air), with the bed occupying a niche created by the bed curtains and far wall. Meanwhile, the organic swirls of the rococo moldings on the wall and on the bedside table bring the natural world and its processes into the chamber. Wertheimer’s The Revenge of the Flowers is likewise claustrophobic, with its pitch-black room and bed-curtains that twist into a nightmarish monster. The sensationalism of floral asphyxiation by murder or mishap is indicated by the prevalence of “fake news” reports and the international popularity of art prints on the theme. Collier’s painting had the additional factor of depicting suicide at a time when suicide was illegal and, as historian Olive Anderson has suggested, “as gripping as a good murder.”66 Women’s sexual promiscuity and moral and mental derangement were closely aligned in popular and medical discourse. As literary critic Elaine Showalter has argued, drowning was posited as an escape from sexual dishonor and as “the last resort of the seduced, abandoned and insane.” Showalter notes that, by the 1890s, “Ophelia became the prototype not only of deranged women in Victorian literature and art but also of the young female asylum patient.”67 By painting an “Ophelia-type,” drowning not in water but in floral fumes, Collier aligns his Albine with asylum case studies of women diagnosed with hysteria, hyperesthesia, and erotomania. Although Albine is depicted with arms crossed, restful, and with a beatific composure—preparations aimed at raising suicide as nearly as possible to the status of a good death—the very act of suicide links the painting to Victorian ideas around female promiscuity and vice. Scent and Decay In Collier’s painting, there is a mix of delicate white spring flowers, symbolic of innocent girlhood, and sumptuous, richly colored summer blooms, indicative of sensuous womanhood. This juxtaposition is fitting, given Zola’s characterization of Albine as a girl who is as innocent and (following her relations with Father Mouret) as experienced as the birds and the bees. In the novel, Zola describes Albine as the “absolute essence” of floral femininity; she smells like “a great rose” and “the scent of the entire garden” emanates from her dress, while her name evokes her whiteness or purity.68 In this context, the white flowers in the painting—jasmine, tuberose, hyacinth, and white rose—evoke this oxymoron of innocent passion. Each of these flowers has a scent that is at once sweet and fresh, cloying and carnal, thanks to the high percentage of the sultry sweet-smelling chemical indole they contain. Jasmine, which exudes its most exquisite perfume at dawn, the very time represented in the painting, is described by the perfume historian Mandy Aftel as “rich and warm, heavy and fruity, intensely floral”

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and as “nearly narcotic in its ability to seize the senses and the imagination.”69 In the Victorian language of flowers, tuberose or “mistress of the night” means “dangerous pleasures” or “bereavement,” and its inclusion in the painting points to Zola’s account of scent, orgasm, and death. The perfumer Roja Dove describes tuberose as the “harlot of perfumery” because its velvety, creamy fragrance is putrid-sweet.70 As the blossoms fade and deteriorate, its scent remains tenacious, possessing a quality of “dewy mushroom and earth when in bloom and then of rot and bloody meat when browning,” according to the perfume writer Elena Vosnaki.71 Since smell as the cause of death is central to the narrative of the painting, the viewer is prompted to imagine the combined smell of the corpse and the flowers. We might imagine the overpowering scent of the flowers permeating Albine’s boudoir and the sweet, sultry note intensifying as the scent of her decomposing flesh marries with that of the wilting blooms. The idea of smell in the painting, triggered by the associated narrative, heightens the notion of the as-yet-undiscovered corpse as liminal, in transition from life to death and from dead to decomposed. Moreover, this sense of liminality is reinforced by the fact that we smell the flowers and the body one step removed, through pictorial representation. Smell then represents not only the cause of death but also the breaking down of matter; it becomes “dangerous matter out of place” floating from the flowers, the body, and into the space of the room, which we imagine inhabiting.72 Writing of Ophelia, art historian Ron Brown suggests that Millais depicts his heroine caught in a process of fusion with nature, appearing as “a bright-colored stain on the water, watery against the water, a flower against the flowers.” Millais’s figure of Ophelia is “imperfect, fluid, weak, fragmented”; in Collier’s painting likewise, there are allusions to the breaking down of the body.73 There are clear parallels between the corpse of Albine and the fresh-cut flowers, both of which show no signs of decay, and yet which we can imagine to have started the process of decay nonetheless, since decomposition starts at the moment of death. The flowers make us more aware of the porous nature of the body and the fragility of the skin. And by bringing our attention to our senses, they might also heighten thoughts of the stench of death. The roses seem to leach out from the corpse and to ooze over the sheets; indeed, like the roses on the table in Draper’s Pot Pourri (see fig. 36), they evoke a bloody stain, triggering thoughts of the postmortem seepage of fluids. Letting Go This sense of the body returning to nature can also be seen in Odilon Redon’s Ophelia Among the Flowers of about 1905–8 (fig. 65). If Millais’s Ophelia suggests drowning, Redon’s painting evokes the idea of drowning in water and scent—of being subsumed and suffocated under the cold water and the scent of the blooms as the current drags her under and her wet garments weigh her

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down. Against the rosy glow of the sunset, the startling intensity of the luscious red berries, and the vivid surprise of glorious blue flowers and leaves, Ophelia is a nebulous, ethereal figure—barely there. Pale and wan, she seems to dissolve into the billowing mists of colored light and vapor and the swirling puffs of blue mist rising from the brook. Here scent is suggested by the tinted vapors, but also by the smudging of pastel. While some of the colored leaves and flowers are contained within their outlines, others are smudged beyond their boundaries. This creates a visual parallel of the dissolution of volatile scent; the powdery pigment echoes the corpuscular theory of the release of odor molecules from matter into the atmosphere, which in turn echoes Ophelia’s own dissolution from the material to the immaterial world. Easily dislodged from the surface of the paper, we have the sense of the fragile pastel pigments as trembling, vibrating particles, released, but for the glazed frame, like a scent into the air—a blurring of the division between our world and Ophelia’s. We look and imagine breathing in the painting. The painting, with its trippy colors and notion of drowning in scent, has a surreal quality that links to Redon’s earlier dreamlike monotones, such as The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity (1882). Fascinated by the ocular, Redon exhibited with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac at the 1884 Salon des Indépendants, but he soon rejected their Postimpressionist interest in color theory and the science of visual perception in favor of a more personal vision in which imagination trumps observation. A Symbolist painter and printmaker who, like Moreau, was much admired by Des Esseintes in Huysmans’s Against Nature, he wanted to move away from what he saw as a slavish copying of nature and instead to “place the visible at the service of the invisible.”74 Redon’s rubbing and blending of the powdery pastels suggests the fading away of Ophelia, the dissolving of her body back into nature and the release of her soul, her essence, her scent into the atmosphere. It is as if we see her life ebbing away. Her departing spirit seems to dissolve into the colored mists that envelop her as her body sinks into the water and the floating garland closes over her. As a dreamscape, Ophelia Among the Flowers is quiet, contemplative, and melancholic, yet it also evokes a sense of elation at the triumphant release of the spirit from life and from suffering. Through her death, Shakespeare’s heroine escapes from the patriarchal dominance that constrained her life. In the painting, we see the dying Ophelia letting go—finally at one with herself and nature. Scent stands for a dissolving of boundaries between self and other, as woman and landscape fuse into radiant color. Scent and Stone In “Flower Odors,” the author proclaims scentless flowers as appropriate for funerals, finding “the stately, frozen calla . . . a fit trophy, bound with laurel leaves, to lay upon a soldier’s bier” and “the snow-cold camellia” with “its

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Fig. 65  Odilon Redon, Ophelia Among the Flowers, ca. 1905–8. Pastel on paper, 64 × 91 cm. © The National Gallery, London. Bought with a contribution from the Art Fund, 1977.

stony sculpturing . . . the very emblem for those white features whence God has drained away the life.”75 If scentless flowers encapsulate the lifeless shell of a corpse after the soul has departed, how much more disturbing that Albine’s body lies decomposing among fragrant blooms. Yet, if smell in Collier’s The Death of Albine suggests the breaking down of the body, it also suggests its hardening (see fig. 60). The bedchamber is as gloomy as a sepulchre, and Albine appears reminiscent of a tomb effigy, particularly given the trope of “sleep as death” in funereal sculpture. While the critic for the London Standard detected a sense of warmth and plasticity in the “sweetly virginal figure,” a critic for the Manchester Courier described Albine as “white and cold.”76 Like a stiffening body in the process of rigor mortis, she is both. Her face and arms have the softness of living flesh and a rosy tint to them, yet the subtle suggestion of her legs and stomach beneath the soft-flowing drapery of her nightgown has a sculptural quality, a hardness that is echoed in the heavy curtain pleats and the starched bed linen with its ironed creases. A reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette noted a “hard” quality to the flower painting and “its too general firmness

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Fig. 66  John William Godward, At the Garden Shrine, 1892. Oil on canvas, 64 × 26 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

throughout,” and this effect complements the symbolism of the metamorphosis of bodies into statues that runs through Zola’s novel.77 In an earlier scene, Father Mouret describes the “peaceful death” achieved by his long vigils to the Virgin Mary and the sublimation of his sexual impulses, while using a masturbatory metaphor to liken himself to a stone saint soaked through or embalmed with incense “down to the smallest folds” of his organs.78 In Collier’s painting, Albine’s body is likewise hardening to something marble-like, embalmed by the scent of the flowers.

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Ideas of incense and petrifaction are also suggested in Godward’s At the Garden Shrine (1892), in which the stillness of the scene portends the fate of Pompeii (fig. 66). A Pompeiian girl stands at the center of the painting, spellbound by the scent of the rose in her hand. The gryphon hewn in fine relief into the garden wall has been petrified, we might imagine, mid-prance, and the roaring lions carved into the marble table legs are silenced in stone. Everything seems fixed in its place for eternity, while the smoke from the incense burner on the altar continues its gentle unfurling motion, marking the passage of time. As in Schramm’s The Perfect Scent (see fig. 7), two facets of womanhood are presented in the painting: demure femininity is represented by the delicate act of smelling a cultivated rose, while a carnal model of female sexuality is evoked through the inclusion of feral referents. As in Watts’s Choosing (see fig. 5), the stance of the female figure reinforces the dichotomy. Here, the figure’s raised hand holding the rose to her face is diametrically opposed by her other hand, which reaches behind to the table for support and rests upon an animal fur—a tactile gesture that heightens the sensual charge of the scene. The image reinforces the notion of Pompeii as having been at the peak of civilization, enjoying the finest art and luxuries, and yet ultimately defenseless against the onslaught of nature’s reclamation. In the painting, wild nature has been temporarily tamed—the tiger has been skinned and is “stayed” by the female figure’s hand, the beasts are carved into marble, the fruit is picked, and the flower in her hand is cut—and yet, nature threatens to invade the garden and bring about a return to the natural order. The stillness of the scene suggests an air of complacency; while the girl is absorbed in trifling pleasures, the ivy continues its slow creep over the garden wall. The frivolous gesture of smelling the rose, then, illustrates Roman decadence and decline. By placing the act of smelling a rose at the center of the painting (with all the connotations that the sense of smell and roses held), Godward indicates a fine balance both between cultivated refinement and primal instincts and between high civilization and a return to man’s primitive roots. Ambergris and “the Other” Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris (1880; see fig. 19) also evokes a sense of petrification, as if the unfurling incense fumes are slowly turning the figure to stone. A Moroccan woman infuses her body and senses with the scent of ambergris rising from the smoldering embers at her feet. She stands caryatid-like, a visual juxtaposition of the column by which she stands within the hard architectural space of the Moroccan courtyard. The painting’s air of quiet, spiritual dignity and monumental splendor is created by the statuesque gravitas of the figure, the soft gray coils of scented smoke, the milk-white of the column and walls, the buttery and pearl tones of her robes, and the cleanliness of the ornate, patterned tiles.

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With its play of whites on white, Sargent insisted upon the “primacy of form over content,” stating in a letter to his friend Vernon Lee that the “subject is of very little importance.”79 The painting is but a visual meditation on scent and sunlight. Yet underlying this sense of peaceful stillness, majestic dignity, and spiritual purification is the ambiguity of ambergris as both foul and fragrant. Sargent’s words and the beauty of the image seduce art historians into dismissing its cultural contexts, reducing it to an “a-historical tone poem.”80 Yet a Western painting of the Orient can never be just that. Rather, it is a complex image in which the dignified beauty of a scented purification ritual vies with the base connotations of inhaling animal filth. Sargent’s aesthetics, lack of narrative, ethnographic observations, and comments to Lee should not deflect us from the inherent implications of a depiction of an Eastern woman marked out and differentiated by the inhaling of this scent, with its particular associations. Fumée d’ambre gris is an image of slow intoxication and mystic esotericism. The Salon critic for the French journal L’Art found it to be both sensual and spiritual, suggesting a “voluptuous Moorish woman . . . intoxicated like a nun at the altar.”81 Relishing the aura of mystery that shrouded the purification ritual, Henry James confessed, “I know not who this stately Mohammedan may be, nor in what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged; but in her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes . . . she is beautiful and memorable.”82 With its sweet earthy fragrance, ambergris also held an aura of mystery, due to the rarity of supplies, the romance of its sourcing, and the uncertainty of its origins. Exorbitantly priced, supplies were entirely dependent upon sailors and beachcombers chancing upon it bobbing on the ocean or washed up on the beach, or whalers opening up a dead whale for its blubber only to discover a small fortune packed within the carcass.83 While ambergris was recognized as the product of a rare pathological condition of the sperm whale, perfumers and journalists debated the precise identity of this greasy, decomposing, yet sweet-smelling matter. Conjectures included excrement, vomit, a morbid growth caused by genital cysts, and finally (as we know today), a pathological intestinal secretion caused by the irritation of the sharp, indigestible beaks and pens of squid and cuttlefish, upon which the whale feeds.84 Although Longman’s Magazine announced in 1885 that “ambergris has now been robbed of its mysteries, and is known to be unprosaically formed by a morbid condition of the intestine,” more than a decade later the Scientific American Supplement continued to report that “the trustworthy facts relating to this most interesting and singularly valued product are few and far between.”85 The process of turning “raw” ambergris into the finest of all perfume ingredients seemed nothing short of alchemy.86 Piesse described fresh ambergris as black, viscous, mixed with blood and feces, and reeking of an overpowering, nauseating stench when released from a decomposing whale carcass. Floating on the ocean waves and warmed by the sun, it oxidized, lost volatility, and became dry,

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gray, and hard, releasing a much subtler, sweeter scent, which Piesse likened to “dried cow-dung.”87 Only when dried, used in tiny amounts, and then diluted greatly, did the crude animal substance transform into the sweet, musky scent prized by perfumers—an aroma described by the New York Times in 1895 as “like the blending of new mown hay, the damp woodsy fragrance of a fern-copse, and the faintest possible perfume of the violet.”88 That the exquisite scent at the heart of such popular Victorian perfumes as Creed’s Fleurs du Bulgarie (1845) and Piesse and Lubin’s Jockey Club (1851), should be found “in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale,” was, as Herman Melville indicates in Moby-Dick (1851), a constant source of amazement.89 As the French psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte argues in History of Shit (2000), “smells have no place in the constitutive triad of civilisation: hygiene, order and beauty. . . . In the empire of hygiene and order, odor will always be suspect. Even when exquisite, it will hint at filth submerged in excessive perfume, its very sweetness redolent of intoxication and vice.”90 By depicting the female figure in the act of marking herself with this intense fecal-like animal odor, Sargent continued what Jenner has described as one of the grand (and contestable) narratives of smell and civilization, “that smell has been regarded as more central to earlier, simpler or less literate cultures than that of the modern West.”91 For Western audiences, the perceived Eastern pleasure and attention brought to scenting the body, clothes, home, and cooking through complex practices, including fumigations, ablutions, oils, ointments, distilled waters, beverages, spices, and aromatic leaves, was both intriguing and repelling in its “otherness.” Here, the strong “exotic” animal scent acts as a marker of social identity, indicating the “Otherness” of the “mysterious” Eastern woman. The act of infusing her body and clothes with this potent fixative is in stark contrast to the expectations of etiquette for Western women. In her book Gems of Deportment (1881), the American journalist Martha Louise Rayne defined the appropriate use of perfume as a scent “so delicate, so daintily used, and so lingeringly fragrant that no one could define it as anything but the ghost of a sweet scent, a faint clinging memory of sweetness.”92 Hypocritically, given the abundance of ambergris-based perfumes on the market, Westerners typically perceived Eastern women as holding a marked proclivity for animalics, and this in turn was held as evidence of less refined physical and moral sensibilities. Even though the woman appears stately in her solitude, conducts a purification ritual, and is wellshrouded—in contrast to the many voyeuristic Orientalist images of odalisques and harem belly dancers—critics still noted the impropriety of her kohl-painted eyes and brows, rouged lips, painted nails, and bejeweled little finger.93 Reflecting on the painting in a Salon review of 1880, a critic for Le musée artistique et littéraire was titillated by the reputed aphrodisiacal effects of ambergris, noting that Casanova added it to his chocolate and that “the canvas is the more intriguing if one is au fait with these refinements of exquisite delight.” “It is a canvas

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for the secret boudoir of an epicurean beauty,” the reviewer claimed, and one which might introduce a craze for ambergris consumption.94 Despite the sophistication of the tiles, architecture, costume, jewelry (silver fibulae), customs, and exotic accoutrements, as well as the cleanliness of the scene and the apparent spiritual earnestness of the female figure, nineteenth-century ideas about the “Otherness” of Oriental culture are deeply embedded within the painting and its reception. Though Eastern countries held no particular monopoly on the supply, refinement, or use of ambergris, its status as both putrid and pure, base and sublime, rendered it an apt symbol for the imagined “Orient.” With its visual elision of Orient, Woman, and perfume, Fumée d’ambre gris evokes a nineteenth-century construction of the “Orient as Perfume”—as something feminine, spiritual, and mystical, yet with corruption at its core. The perfume historian James Craven writes “ambergris lends a scent a tenacious depth, richness, opulence, smoothness and ambiguity, and an unsettling ‘do I love it, or hate it?’ quality. It prompts the intriguing thought: ‘I am divinely scented and delicious, but am I entirely clean?’”95 A fitting metaphor, then, for the Western agenda of “Orientalist” painting. Perfuming the “Orient” “Orientalist” imagery promulgated an enchanting myth of perfume’s mystique. The American Impressionist and Orientalist painter Henry Siddons Mowbray conveyed a slow “Oriental” pace of life in scenes of floral narcosis. Works such as The Festival of Roses (1886) and Attar of Roses (1894) depict exotically garbed maidens languishing among petals, the sheer abundance and rich chromatic hue of which create an irresistible suggestion of perfume.96 Shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, The Rose Harvest (1887; fig. 67) portrays women spraying rose petals on the ground in preparation for the passage of a newlywed Indian princess and, like Curran’s The Peris (see fig. 51), takes inspiration from Moore’s poem Lalla Rookh.97 The bodies of the lounging girls are half-submerged, lap-deep in petals, as they pluck and scoop them into vessels. Like the child in Frédéric’s The Fragrant Air (see fig. 2), the smallest girl appears overcome by the intoxicating scent as she wallows among the flowers. Although Mowbray visited Algeria in 1885 and spent his early childhood in Egypt, these paintings are the “scented visions” of the armchair traveler, fascinated by a fantasy of Oriental sensory indulgence. In The Perfume Makers (date unknown), by the Austro-French painter, printmaker, and ceramics decorator Rudolf Ernst, a woman bearing a basket heaped with roses enters an “Oriental” perfumery (fig. 68). A patch of intense azure sky framed by the doorway leads our imagination to the fields and the rose harvest beyond. A second woman sits on a tiled hearth leisurely processing a mound of

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Fig. 67  Henry Siddons Mowbray, The Rose Harvest, 1887. Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 50.8 cm. Photo: Museum Purchase: Exchange Funds from the Gift of Mrs. John White Alexander. 1998.19. Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.

pink blossoms, picking the petals and putting them into a large earthenware urn. Over a fireplace, a copper vat gleams. Ostensibly a view of industry, this fantasy of perfume production evokes the stillness and timelessness of an imagined “Orient,” unhurried by the imperatives of work. Ernst, who was based in Paris but visited Constantinople in 1890, created several versions on this theme. In each, as in Alma-Tadema’s In a Rose Garden (1889), perfume is conceived of as the product of Arcadia, remote from steam-powered flower farming, the use of synthetics, and solvent extraction, which, by the turn of the twentieth century, characterized perfumery in the industrial West. Incense and Trance In Fumée d’ambre gris (see fig. 19), the visual prospect of the sun-drenched, perfume-saturated atmosphere, with its illusion of scent particles shifting and diffusing within the dazzling sunlight, is almost hallucinatory in its lucidity. There is something hypnotic in slowly tracing the elevation of the scent as it

Fig. 68  Rudolf Ernst, The Perfume Makers, date unknown. Oil on panel, 92 × 72 cm. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

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spirals out of the silver censer. Incense, trance, and the stilling of the body and mind formed a recurring motif in scenes of the imagined Orient, ancient classical culture, and timeless, placeless visions of exotic, esoteric ritual, including Solomon’s A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867–68; see fig. 44), Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876; see fig. 18), Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886), Khnopff’s Incense (1898), and Takách’s Incense (ca. 1910; see fig. 30). Four years prior to painting The Death of Albine, Collier explored the mind-altering effect of suffocating sulfur fumes in The Priestess of Delphi (1891), “a great public favourite” among visitors to The Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, where it hung from 1893 (fig. 69).98 The painting depicts the ancient Greek high priestess Pythia, of the Temple of Apollo, perched on Apollo’s tripod, which is set over fissures in the earth’s crust. The Adelaide Advertiser described “the wreathing streams and fumes of subterranean turmoil” ascending from the crevice, inducing her to “a state of hysteria, under the spell of which the prophecies or answers of the Oracle were delivered.”99 In her left hand, she holds a sprig of laurel, a hallucinogenic that, according to ancient legend, Pythia would tear and eat to fuel her spiritual visions. When the painting first entered the Gallery, a number of critics focused on the effects of the sulfur, which was known to trigger narcosis, delirium, and loss of consciousness. A critic for the Melbourne paper The Argus described the priestess as “gradually succumbing to the influence of the fumes. . . . Her closed eyes are thrown into shadow by her mantle, and her lips are parted as if for the deliverance of some mystical response to a questioner.”100 Similarly, the South Australian Register described how the priestess “gradually became affected in a remarkable manner, and fell into an ecstatic condition, in which she uttered wild and extraordinary phrases, which were held to be the utterance of Apollo himself.” The writer focused on the depiction of the fumes in the painting, observing the “stupefying vapors rising with a strong jet from the fissure at the feet of the tripod and then curling, spiraling upward, dimming, but not obscuring, the lower part of the seated figure.” Bringing to mind sulfur’s rotten egg odor, they noted “the growing power enveloping her” as “the vapour floats and mingles in the air.”101 Here, we might imagine, visions come in a flash. The critic for The Advertiser described how “The Priestess, the revealer of hidden secrets, gleams bright and luminous against a background as profound, dark and hidden as were those secrets whose revelation the suppliant sought.”102 The turn of the twentieth century also saw a trend for trance imagery of women dancing amid swirls of incense fumes, such as Artigue’s painting Intoxication (date unknown) and his poster for Prudhomme’s “Oriental” perfume Semiramis (1900), which depicts the legendary queen of Babylon. At the same time, incense and trance motifs infiltrated dance itself. The American pioneer of modern American dance, Ruth St. Denis, moved slowly and sinuously in her solo dance Incense, an East Indian–themed, Hindu-inspired dance, which she

Fig. 69  John Collier, The Priestess of Delphi, 1891. Oil on canvas, 160 × 80 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia. Gift of the Rt. Honourable, the Earl of Kintore 1893. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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first performed at the Hudson Theatre in New York in March 1906, and which stayed in her repertoire throughout her life.103 Swaying in harmony with fragrant fumes rising from censers at her side, her slow sensual motions formed a languorous simulation of the curls of smoke, until her body appeared to metamorphose into the scent.104 Photographs by the Notman studio (ca. 1908) and later by Strauss Peyton (1916) show her draped in a gauzy gray sari, the transparent filmy layers of which twist over her body to suggest swirling smoke as she performs a series of graduated movements (fig. 70). Each posture develops out of the one preceding it and dissolves gradually and almost imperceptibly into Fig. 70  Photographer the next, a visual echo of the fragrant smoke ascendunknown, Ruth St. Denis, ing, suspended and shifting mid-air, as if without without usual black wig, in beginning or end. As a reporter for The World noted, Incense, ca. 1908. Photographic the sensual motions, slow unfolding patterns and print. Photo: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York twisting arabesques were in marked contrast to the Public Library for the Performing “energetic exhibition of clever gymnastics . . . high Arts. kicks, complicated steps and lightning changes” of American stage dancing.105 Standing, walking, kneeling, folding the hands in salutation to the deity, lifting and resetting the offering tray, or scattering incense into the fire: her movements were few, simple, and deliberate, the stillness creating a sense of timelessness, of India as a place of atemporal customs and rituals, untouched by the accelerated pace of the West. The Abuse of Scent From Victorian Classical Aestheticism to European Symbolism and American and European Orientalism, scenes of fragrant intoxication acquire particular resonance when set alongside Decadent literature of the period, in which the use and abuse of scent and perfume and its attendant pleasures and pains were aestheticized.106 An example of an early work that reflects this fascination is Swinburne’s novel Lesbia Brandon, written between 1859 and 1868 and published posthumously in 1952, in which Lesbia “killed herself by inches with the help of eau-de-cologne and doses of opium.”107 Later, in Goncourt’s Cherie of 1883, the protagonist lives in a perfumed cloud of “tuberose, orange blossoms, jasmine, vetiver, opoponax, violet, tonka bean, ambergris, sandalwood, bergamot, neroli, rosemary, benzoin and verbena” and has a particular penchant for patchouli.108 Such stories were surely inspiration for a spate of “fake news” articles suggesting that a new craze of perfume injection, comparable to morphine consumption, was

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rife in bohemian Paris. In 1890, a writer in the St James’s Gazette claimed that perfumes such as patchouli were injected into the skin and into the bloodstream in order to calm nerves “agitated by excited days and sleepless nights.”109 This story resumed three days later in the London Chronicle, where it was suggested that perfume injections were a “perilous fad among Parisiennes seeking dainty sensations.”110 Similar reports of “perfume maniacs” seeking to “perfume the blood” surfaced sporadically in the London, New York, Washington, and Chicago press right up until 1912.111 The reports jibe at the stock figure of the enervated Parisian mademoiselle, abusing her body with perfumes in the name of “aroma therapeutics.” This fanciful notion lies behind Mucha’s poster for the French perfume Rodo of 1896, which suggests the act of injection by depicting a female figure shooting perfume from a pipette toward her arm (fig. 71).112 Perfumes, like drugs, were conceived of as having not only a physiological effect but also a moral impact upon the body and mind. In 1894, the New York Times noted the “brazen impudence” of Continental flower girls “constantly under the influence of the perfume of the flowers” in which they trade. “Perfumes,” the writer continued, “are on the whole much more demoralising than alcohol or opium,” concluding that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union “should at once take a crusade against perfumery.”113 Despite the tongue-in-cheek tone, the conflation of floral fragrance and lax morals indicates how people were likely to view works such as Waterhouse’s A Flower Market, Old Rome (1886) and Louis Marie de Schryver’s paintings of Parisian flower markets in the 1890s—with their visual equivalents of Zola’s fruit seller, La Sariette. How intriguing then, that Collier’s The Death of Albine, featuring the tragic “scent overdose” of an innocent, uneducated young girl, abused by a Catholic priest, was first bought by a campaigner both for temperance and for women’s education. As the founder of the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwellings Company and a champion of slum reform, the economist William Smart was well versed in Victorian ideas around sanitation, air, health, and morality. Did Zola’s cautionary tale hold a didactic significance for him? Was that his motivation in showing the painting at Toynbee Hall and bequeathing it to Glasgow Art Gallery? Whatever the case, with their themes of perfume intoxication and suffocation, images such as Collier’s The Death of Albine (see fig. 60), Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (see fig. 58), and Mucha’s poster for Rodo (see fig. 71) responded to the perceived hyperartificial sensate of the modern city. Intoxicating Pictures “A red-rose picture with flakes of cream petals. It has a divine power of endowing the mind with fragrance, & with that delicate transporting joy that roses alone can give. The sweetness, the muffling softness, the utterable pink—ah, it is a picture that make’s one’s heart-blood leap delightedly.”114 On visiting the

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Fig. 71  Alphonse Mucha, poster advertising Lance Parfum’s Rodo, 1896. Color lithograph. Photo: Mucha Trust / Bridgeman Images.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1888, the Decadent poet/writers Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley diarized their experience of looking at Alma-Tadema’s “rain and ruin of roses,” describing it as a synesthetic experience, with the pictorial scent taking an intoxicating hold upon the viewer.115 Such ideas were not new. In 1837, a year after writing his article “L’art des parfums,” the critic ThoréBürger described Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Le Siècle magazine as having a drug-like influence on the viewer. With its exotic sensuousness and depiction

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of tobacco, opium, or hashish smoked through the hookah pipe, the painting, he wrote, works “like a perfume,” quieting and stilling the viewer, whose breathing slows down. Almost two decades prior to Bain’s work on “remembered sensations,” Thoré-Bürger imagined the viewer not only as breathing in the scent conveyed but as being intoxicated by its effects.116

Conclusion

Can You Smell Visual Art? In an advertisement for Lundborg’s Famous Perfumes published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1891, a little girl in a white frock holds up a bottle of scent to the nose of a sculpted bust of a beautiful female, reminiscent of the head of the Venus de Milo (fig. 72). The text below the image reads, “Can you smell?” The head of the sculpture is tilted forward, with nose turned downward and lips pursed as if straining to smell the fragrance, while the little girl appears statuesque, standing on a pouf that resembles a plinth, the length of her white dress echoing the column pedestal before her. Since the girl is on tiptoe, stretching up to the statue, while the bust appears to incline toward her, the focal point of the image is the space between them, where we imagine the air to be sweet with the scent emanating from the open bottle. The perfume enables this metamorphosis—marble to flesh and flesh to marble. Like Pygmalion’s love, the advertisement seems to suggest, this “Famous” product has the potency to arouse life even in an inanimate artwork. At the same time, the image riffs on Condillac’s sensory philosophy, as we imagine the sealed marble statue enjoying its first sensations and hence its first thoughts and emotions—just as the consumer will be “reawakened” to life’s pleasures. By evoking the idea of an animated statue, the image suggests an impulse from stasis toward motion, which, as art historian Lynda Nead has suggested, was implicit in art and visual culture in the years prior to the advent of cinema.1 However, it also points to the synesthetic impulse to trigger sensory experiences through visual media that was central to Victorian Aestheticism and that characterized much of Western art from 1850 to 1914. The question “Can you

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Fig. 72  “Can You Smell?,” advertisement for Lundborg’s Famous Perfumes, ca. 1891. Collection of Christina Bradstreet.

smell?,” posed by the little girl to the statue, hints at this wider desire for art not only to move but also to become sensate—if not to breathe in scent as the statue does, then to convey the scents depicted. “Can you smell?” is the question asked of viewers of this image and, arguably, of all the artworks discussed in this book. Throughout these years, artists and writers vied with the limitations of the visual and the verbal for kindling the senses, wrestling with the question of whether this form of synesthesia was, as art historian Martin Jay puts it, “a genuine paradise lost or merely a fantasy of poetic imagination?”2 As we have seen, the desire for a fuller, richer experience of images and words ran through art and literature and across movements and cultures. From Curran, who strove to teach his students how to paint the perfume of flowers and to regard sensory suggestion as an artist’s “purpose,” to Carrà, who dreamt of a “total” painting that would directly evoke sensory experience, the impulse was to render the visual image multisensory.3 At the same time, it seems that many viewers and readers were alert to synesthetic modes of looking. From the critics who claimed to be overpowered by the sickly sweet, miasmic perfume of Rossetti’s poetry to Cooper’s and Bradley’s synesthetic experience of Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of

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Heliogabalus, synesthetic encounters—whether in wordplay or experience— suffuse art and literary commentary from circa 1850 to 1914. The dream was for art to be truly multisensory; the reality was less clear. Was the art viewer to remain like Condillac’s statue (or Dickens’s image of Bridgman), sealed off from scent, sound, taste, and touch by the unsurpassable limitations of the eye—or could art be a multisensory, synesthetic feast for all the senses? Can you smell, indeed? From Miasma to the Machine Age The painter’s desire to suggest nonvisual sensations was not unique to the years 1850–1914. Efforts to visualize smell date back to the earliest civilizations. Nevertheless, the compulsion to see smell in order to make miasma knowable and thus controllable was a phenomenon of the 1850s. This fear-driven quest became a catalyst for curiosity, so that sixty years later, when germ theory had driven out miasma theory in the public understanding, the desire to see and visualize smell was still inspiring a wealth of “scented visions.” By the 1890s and early 1900s, artists were reimagining fragrance as shimmering, glinting molecules and palpable fragrance trails, or picturing fantasy-scapes at the “heart of the rose.” Two objects, bookending the dates of this study, illustrate this point. In 1850, Punch published a cartoon (fig. 73) showing, as if through a microscope, the “myriad of miniscule yet hideous” forms, including the “bodies of aldermen, churchwardens and undertakers as well as bailiffs and slopsellers,” that might be “revealed in a drop of London water through the Molecular Magnifier, illuminated by the Intellectual Electric Light.”4 Its opposite number might be said to be Lalique’s flaçon for Rosace Figurines of 1912, a design that imagines a view into a droplet of Coty’s scent (fig. 74). The spherical shape of the clear, frosted sepia glass bottle creates the sense of looking under a microscope and seeing four fairies dancing in a ring.5 While the cartoon sits within Punch magazine’s midcentury campaign for sanitary improvement, the perfume bottle is a joyous celebration of the aesthetics of scent and reflects the quest (like Burne-Jones’s pilgrim) to reach the heart and soul of the rose and the essence of perfume. It is no coincidence, then, that the majority of images in this study date from the 1850s to the 1860s, when the need to see smell was at its most urgent, and the 1890s to circa 1912, when fascination with the mysteries of scent (both scientific and esoteric) reached its zenith, before the First World War accelerated Modernist sensibilities. The sensuousness of Aestheticism in the 1860s and 1870s was in part a response to the ascetism of the industrial age, with its machine-made products and scentless roses. Floral scent came to be seen as archaic and spiritual, worlds away from the realities of industrial modernity, and this partly explains its appeal to artists, from establishment to counterculture and those on the fringe. Several of the more obscure works in this study, such as Yakunchikova’s The Fragrance

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Fig. 73  “The Wonders of a London Water Drop,” cartoon in Punch 18 (May 11, 1850): 188–89. Photo: Punch Cartoon Library / Topfoto.

(see fig. 49) and Béla Takách’s Incense (see fig. 30), date from the 1890s and early 1900s, when the olfactory imagination entranced those in pursuit of decadent pleasures, Symbolist secrets, and esoteric mysticism. How ironic, then, that the hypersensuality associated with “scented visions” came to be seen as symptomatic of the hyperesthesia of the urban age. Scent and the Moving Image As the animated statue in the Lundborg perfume poster suggests, by 1890, the impulse for smell in visual culture was swept up in the drive for motion. We see this in William Logsdail’s The Bank and the Royal Exchange (1887), in which a girl on an omnibus (at the bottom right) inhales the scent of a rose, the scent transporting her away from the bustle of the traffic into a world of the memory and the imagination. Likewise, in The City Atlas (1888–89), by the New English Art Club painter Sidney Starr, a girl seated boldly on the top of an Atlas Omnibus

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Fig. 74  René Jules Lalique, perfume bottle, Flaçon Rosace Figurines, designed ca. 1912 for François Coty. Clear glass with blue patina, 11 cm. Private collection. Photo provided courtesy of the Silvio Denz Foundation, © Christie Mayer Lefkowith, The Art of René Lalique: Flacons and Powder Boxes, 2010. Photographer: Skot Yobbagy.

is driven forward into the hubbub of the London metropolis. Her back to us, we cannot tell the extent to which the scent of the bouquet in her arms competes for her attention with the busy, moving traffic. This association of scent and motion also characterizes Hartmann’s perfume concert A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes (1902) with its narrative of scent-inspired travel imagery suggesting the moving panorama of early cinema. The first scented cinema experience came just four years later, in 1906, when Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, the owner of the

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Family Theatre in Forest City, Pennsylvania, wafted rose scent into the auditorium during a newsreel screening of the Pasadena Rose Parade, a New Year’s Day festival of flower-covered floats, marching bands, and equestrians.6 By 1959, when Professor Hans Laube, inventor of “smell-o-vision,” patented an apparatus to endow motion pictures with odor emissions, the idea of a “total” cinematic experience had long held appeal. Indeed, in 1931, Charlie Chaplin wrote an article for the Hull Daily Mail with the arresting headline, “Loathe ‘Talkies’ and ‘Colour-Films’ and Now ‘ScentFilms’ Are Promised!” In it, the silent movie star rejected “the conquest of the talkie, the innovation of colour film and the prospect of three-dimensional relief on the screen” but welcomed the prospect of synchronizing “smells with scenes and actions in motion pictures.” Despite calling such films “the smellies,” a term already coined to dismiss the “talkies” by those who thought the idea stank, Chaplin welcomed the “vista of possibilities” that this technology could bring. Pictures of breakfast could be accompanied by the “fragrance of sausages and coffee,” the entrance of “vamps” indicated with “exotic perfumes,” “sea pictures” would carry the “tang of brine,” and hospital scenes would be redolent of “the smell of chloroform.” “There are occasions,” he wrote, “when an economic use of scents and perfumes, employed by a sensitive artist, and allied with music, would add to the entertainment value of a film. Imagine a simple tune of scents, a legato succession of say, lilac and apple blossom, of wallflower and mignonette. Crescento or crescendo effects of the musical score are brought in, as the automobile on the screen flashes past an orchard in full bloom, or through some old-world village with its quiet cottage garden.” Such effects should be used sparingly. “An overdose would complete the artistic suicide of the cinema,” but if done well might “stir the emotions” and “enrich the drama,” just as music and lighting could do.7 Final Reflections What can we learn from charting the history of smell in art in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, from Hartmann’s perfume concert and Charlie Chaplin’s conceptualization of “Scent-Film” through to the olfactory installations of artists today? Can we say that Chanel No. 5 was a Modernist artwork? How did Modernist painters represent perfume in works such as Pablo Picasso’s The Harem (1906), Marcel Duchamp’s Belle haleine, eau de voilette (1921), René Magritte’s The Scent of the Abyss (1928), Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist Scent (1955), Jasper Johns’s Scent (1976), and Andy Warhol’s Ads (1985)? How was the stench of warfare conveyed by artists during the First and Second World Wars? These are questions for others to answer. However, I hope this book offers a model for further projects on the role of the nonvisual senses in the arts by demonstrating how careful attention to the cultural nuances of smell and smelling can bring to the

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fore significant, and previously overlooked, aspects of artworks. Such projects might move from the study of the relationships of sight and smell to an exploration of the interplay between another set of sensory combinations, or might consider art and the senses in a different historical and cultural framework to that of the modern West. What should now be evident is the nineteenth-century impetus for a rise in olfactory aesthetics and the many pioneering voices behind this “plea for the sense of smell,” without which Duchamp might never have called for a shift away from what he termed “retinal art” to an art of the senses. Relegated to the level of brute sensation by Kant and other philosophers, smell has been overlooked by art historians in favor of sight: the sense of reason and civilization.8 Yet, as this book demonstrates, smell’s more earthly associations—sex, dirt, and miasma—and its associations with the irrational—love, fear, faith, fantasy and insanity—have enriched rather than impoverished its relevance for high art. The tension that resonates from smell’s dual heavenly and terrestrial alignments has made smell an intriguing subject for artists exploring the ambiguous borderline between the beautiful and the repulsive. Yet this in turn has sometimes pushed at the margins of respectability, prompting some “scented visions” to emerge away from the mainstream. Ultimately, however, the appeal of smell for artists and writers seeking a richer, multisensory aesthetic was that it spoke of both inner and outer realms. Applied to the skin, perfumes hold the power to shake man’s inner life and to plumb, with overwhelming directness and immediacy, the primal depths of memory and emotions. As Rudyard Kipling observed in his poem “Lichtenberg” (1903): “Smells are surer than sounds or sights / to make your heart-strings crack.”9

Notes

Introduction 1. Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871): 334–50, 335. 2. For a survey of sensory representation in nineteenth-century art, see Constance Classen, “Art and the Senses: From the Romantics to the Futurists,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, ed. Constance Classen (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 185–211. 3. The others are The Violet’s Message (1854), Wandering Thoughts (ca. 1855), Pot Pourri (1856), and Spring (Apple Blossoms) (begun 1856 and completed 1859). 4. Rossetti owned three incense burners. See Cheyne Walk, Chelsea: The Valuable Contents of the Residence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Deceased), to be Sold by Auction (London: T. E. Wharton, Martin and Co., 1882), lots 380, 432, and 433. 5. See also Solomon’s pen-and-ink drawing Babylon Hath Been Given a Golden Cup (1859) and his engravings Jewish Women Burning Incense and Offering Incense of 1869. In Toilette of a Roman Lady (1869), slave attendants adorn their mistress with perfume and pearls. 6. Examples of Alma-Tadema’s paintings of women smelling flowers include Woman and Flowers (1868), A Greek Woman (1869), An Oleander (1882), In the Corner of My Studio (1893), and Spring Flowers (1911). 7. Classen, “Art and the Senses.” 8. Constance Classen and David Howes, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (London: Routledge, 2014), 25. 9. Mark Jenner, “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 335–51, 342. 10. Cheryl Krueger, “Decadent Perfume: Under the Skin and Through the Page,” Modern Languages Open 28 (October 2014), http://‌doi‌.org‌/10‌.3828‌/mlo‌.v0i1‌.36. 11. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 2 (London:

Murray, 1871), 17–18; Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 89. 12. Viewed with deep-rooted prejudice, black people, criminals, and the working class (caricatured as having snub noses, upturned as if sniffing the air) were widely imagined to be less evolved, with animal-like olfactory acuity. On race and olfactory acuity, see Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 13, and Erica Fretwell, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 131–74. Darwin described the sense of smell as “more highly developed” in the “dark coloured races of men” than in the “white and civilised races,” while Ernst Haeckel described the “ape-like” noses of the “lower races.” Darwin, Descent of Man, 17; Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny (London: Kegan, 1879), 689. On nasal physiognomy, see Eden Warwick, Nasology: Or Hints Towards a Classification of Noses (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 79, republished in Arthur Cheetham, Noses, and How to Read Them: A Lecture (Rhyl: The Author, 1893). On the olfactory acuity of criminals, see Salvatore Ottolenghi’s “L’olfatto nei criminali” (1888), cited in Henry Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Selection in Man,” in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: Davis, 1905), 119. 13. See E. Toulouse and N. Vaschide, “Mesure de l’odorat chez l’homme et chez la femme,” Comptes rendus Société de biologies 51, no. 11 (1899): 381–83. This study, referenced widely in the British press (in articles such as “Olfactory Nerves and Sex,” Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser, August 19, 1899, 6), concluded that the sense of smell was nine times stronger in women than in men. 14. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle

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Dowell (1798; repr., London: Feffer and Simons, 1978), 46. On gendered coding of the senses, see Classen, “Art and the Senses,” 204. 15. On the “male nose,” see Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 114. 16. In the early 1900s, Cécile Paul-Baudry painted erotic scenes of women smelling flowers or incense, including a female nude on silk sheets, writhing with pleasure from the scent of a rose. The sexualized poses in her works follow closely in the tradition of the idealized nudes painted by her father, Jacques-Aimé Baudry, and her tutor William-Adolphe Bouguereau. “Scented visions” by Baudry include Fumeuse d’opium (1912), La jeune esclave (date unknown), and La sultane favorite (1914). 17. See William Powell Frith’s Night— Haymarket (1862), in which a top-hatted theatergoer steers his wife away from a drunken reveler while clasping his handkerchief to his nose. For an example of a middle-class man seemingly unmoved by scent, see the wood engraving accompanying “Illustrations of the Senses: Smell,” Penny Illustrated Paper, May 23, 1868, 12–13, in which a young man proffers flowers as an act of courtship. A rare exception is Robert Seymour’s lithograph “A London Board of Health Hunting After Cases like Cholera, a Caricature of the Medical Profession,” published in McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures (1832). Here sanitary inspectors sniff down drains and up ladders to find the source of cholera. 18. See also Edgar Degas’s Repasseuses (Women Ironing), ca. 1884, in which the women appear impervious to the fug of dirty clothes despite their snub noses. Snub noses were described in contemporary “nasology” as upturned, as if constantly sniffing like an animal. 19. See the wood engraving by H. S. Melville in James Greenwood, Curiosities of Savage Life, 2nd ser., vol. 1 (London: Beeton, 1863), 81. See also the Orientalist paintings of Rudolf Ernst and of Ludwig Deutsch, his fellow Austrian in Paris. 20. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “A Plea for the Sense of Smell,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 13 (1869): 315–427. 21. David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 171.

22. Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998), 109. 23. Stench is not foregrounded in key art-historical studies of nineteenth-century industry and poverty, such as Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), and Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971). 24. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: King, 1877): 83–84, 86; Henry T. Finck, “The Gastronomic Value of Odors,” Contemporary Review 50 (1886): 680–95. 25. Mark M. Smith, “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (2007): 841–58, 847. 26. Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 11. 27. Hans Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 161. 28. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–2, 6. An American, Sargent spent much of his life in Paris and London and exhibited almost yearly at the Paris Salon, including Fumée d’ambre gris in 1889. Millais, Watts, and Burne-Jones each exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibitions: Millais in 1855 and 1878, Watts in 1878, and Burne-Jones in 1884. All three were awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. The presence of Watts and Burne-Jones in Paris was a key factor in their subsequent influence on European Symbolist movements and led directly to Watts’s solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1884. Waterhouse also exhibited at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition as well as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the 1897 Universal Exhibition in Brussels. Alma-Tadema was on the London Advisory Committee for the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. 29. Katherine Haskins, The Art-Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2017), 46. These art journals included, among others, The Magazine of Art (1878–1904), published both in London and New York, and the London-based The Studio (1893–1964), which was reprinted in Paris (with a translation insert) and from 1897 had a sister paper in New York that republished selected articles from the English edition.

Notes to Pages 10–15 30. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 1–2, 6. 31. Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, “Perfumatives: Olfactory Dimensions in Contemporary Art,” Aroma-chology Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 1–6. 32. See Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory of Smell (1617), and Pablo Picasso, The Harem (1906). 33. A sixteenth-century manuscript called the Transitus Mariae described Jesus as conceived through smell, with the Holy Spirit penetrating Mary as a sweet odor. Constance Classen, “The Breath of God: Sacred Histories of Scent,” in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 387. 34. On contemporary art, see Larry Shiner, Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 35. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 4. 36. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 46. 37. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, preface. 38. Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 39. Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 152. 40. Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 393–95. 41. Roger Fry, “The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M.,” The Nation 12, no. 16 (1913): 667. This idea was first expressed by the critic George Moore, who in 1895 described the smooth surface of Frederic Leighton’s paintings as “cream-pink, fastidiously scented toilette soap.” Cited in Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Aestheticising History Painting,” in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, ed. Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 105. 42. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xiii; Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing, 5, 1. 43. Mark M. Smith, “Looking Back: The Explosion of Sensory History,” The Psychologist 23 (October 2010), https://‌thepsychologist .bps‌.org‌.uk‌/volume‌-23‌/edition‌-10‌/

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looking‌-back‌-explosion‌-sensory‌-history; Simon Shaw-Miller, foreword to Art, History and the Senses, ed. Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (London: Ashgate, 2010), xv. 44. Ian Heywood, ed., Sensory Arts and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 24. 45. On ocularcentrism, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). On the senses in visual culture, see Martin Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 307–15. See also Jenni Lauwrens, “Welcome to the Revolution: The Sensory Turn and Art History,” Journal of Art Historiography no. 7 (2012): 1–17, https://‌arthistoriography‌.files ‌.wordpress‌.com‌/2012‌/12‌/lauwrens‌.pdf. 46. Citation in Classen, Color of Angels, 7; see also Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing, 17–36; Classen, “Art and the Senses”; Constance Classen, The Museum of the Senses (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 47. Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing, 17. 48. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination (London: Papermac, 1986); originally published as Le miasme et la jonquille: L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982). 49. Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing, 13. For edited volumes, see David Howes, ed., Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Classen, Cultural History of the Senses; as well as the Sensory Formations series, especially Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader, 29–41. For journals, see The Senses and Society, edited by David Howes for Berg Press. For monographs, see Mark M. Smith’s Sensory Histories series, published by the University of Illinois Press; Perspectives on Sensory History, published by Penn State University Press; and the Sensory Studies series edited by David Howes for Bloomsbury. 50. Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (London: Wiley, 2005); C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Mark Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses (London: Routledge, 2015); Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting

242

Notes to Pages 15–20

Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); and Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015). For a review of smell studies, see Reinarz, Past Scents. See also the bibliography at http://‌www ‌.sensorystudies‌.org‌/books‌-of‌-note/. 51. Lauwrens, “Welcome to the Revolution,” https://‌arthistoriography‌.files‌.wordpress‌.com ‌/2012‌/12‌/lauwrens‌.pdf. 52. Heywood, Sensory Arts and Design; Francesca Bacci, Art and the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and di Bello and Koureas, Art, History and the Senses. See also Francis Halsall, “One Sense Is Never Enough,” Journal of Visual Arts Practice 3, no. 2 (2004): 103–22; François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion, 2010); and Elizabeth Marx, “Visualising Smell in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2021). 53. See Drobnick and Fisher, “Perfumatives,” 1–6; Jim Drobnick, “Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences: Olfactory Dimensions in Contemporary Art,” Parachute 89 (Winter 1998): 10–19; Jim Drobnick, “Inhaling Passions: Art, Sex and Scent,” Sexuality and Culture 4, no. 3 (2000): 37–57; Jim Drobnick, “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality,” Angelaki 7, no. 1 (2002): 31–46; and Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader. See also Shiner, Art Scents, and Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 5–49. 54. Caro Verbeek, “Inhaling Futurism: On the Use of Olfaction in Futurism and Olfactory (Re)constructions,” in Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques and Challenges, ed. Victoria Henshaw, Kate Mclean, Dominic Medway, et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 201–11, and Ariane van Suchtelen, Fleeting— Scents in Colour: Scent and Smell in Dutch and Flemish 17th Century Art (Amsterdam: Waanders and de Kunst Publishers, 2021). 55. Classen, Cultural History of the Senses. On the nineteenth-century senses, see William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Boutin, City of Noise.

56. Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Reinarz, Past Scents; Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Janice Carlisle, Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Rindisbacher, Smell of Books. Cheryl Krueger’s articles include “Lettres parfumées, correspondances fatales,” Littérature 185, no.1 (2017): 39–54; “Decadent Perfume”; “The Scent Trail of Une Charogne,” French Forum 38, no. 1 (2013): 51–68; and “Flâneur Smellscapes: Le Spleen de Paris,” Dix-neuf 16, no. 2 (2012): 181–92. Articles by Érika Wicky include “Du mauvais usage des parfums,” 131–40; “La peinture à vue de nez ou la juste distance du critique d’art, de Diderot à Zola,” Canadian Art Review 39, no.1 (2014): 76–89; and Érika Wicky, Karine Bouchard, and Jean-Alexandre Perras, “La sémiologie des odeurs au XIXe siècle: Du savoir médical à la norme sociale,” Études françaises 49, no. 3 (2013): 119–35. See also Connie Y. Chiang, “The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 405–16.

Chapter 1 1. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), 77. 2. On olfactory dichotomies, see Kelvin E. Y. Low, Scents and Scent-sibilities (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). 3. Steven Connor, “Intersensoriality,” a talk given at a conference on The Senses, Thames Valley University, February 6, 2004, http://‌ste venconnor‌.com‌/intersensoriality‌.html. 4. Rossetti may have seen Watts’s Choosing at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1864. Waterhouse likely viewed it either at the home of his great patron, the financier Alexander Henderson, later the first Baron Faringdon (whose brother, Brodie Henderson, was to buy The Soul of the Rose), or at the Watts retrospective held at the Royal Academy in 1905.

Notes to Pages 23–30 5. Every Lady’s Guide to Her Own Greenhouse (London: Orr, 1851), 54. 6. See Lynda Nead, “Seduction, Prostitution, Suicide: ‘On the Brink’ by Robert Elmore,” Art History 5, no. 3 (1982): 310–22. 7. For more on this theme, see Michael Waters, The Garden in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Scolar, 1988), and William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London and Nottingham (London: Reeves and Turner, 1889), 124–25. 8. On Marx and Charles Fourier’s thinking on the senses, see Howes, Sensual Relations, 204–5. 9. “Flower Odors,” Continental Monthly 6, no. 4 (1864): 469–72, 471. 10. Ibid., 471. 11. See Carlisle, Common Scents. 12. Victor Carl Frieson, “A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau,” in Empire of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 258–59. 13. Henry Thoreau, The Essays of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Richard Dillman (Albany: New York, 1992), 46–47. 14. Anna Christian Burke, The Language of Flowers (London: Warne and Routledge, 1864), 61. 15. Catharine Lake, The Use of the Senses When Engaged in Contemplating the External World (London: J. Nisbet, 1848), 29. 16. Ibid., 29–30. 17. “The Royal Academy,” Art Journal 3 (June 1, 1864): 166. 18. “Fine Arts: The Royal Academy,” Spectator, no. 1873 (May 21, 1864): 593. 19. Regenia Gagnier, “Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages,” English Literature in Translation 51, no. 1 (2008): 23–43, https://‌arcade‌.stanford‌.edu‌/occasion‌/literary ‌-alternatives‌-rational‌-choice‌-historical‌-psy chology‌-and‌-semi‌-detached‌-marriages. 20. “Fine Arts: The Royal Academy,” Spectator, no. 1873 (May 21, 1864): 593. 21. “Fine Arts Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Illustrated London News, May 14, 1864, 18. 22. Constance Classen, “The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories,” Ethos 20 (1992): 133–66. 23. Waters, Garden in Victorian Literature, 37. 24. Burke, Language of Flowers, 13. 25. Phylis A. Floyd, “The Puzzle of Olympia,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3

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(Spring 2004): http://‌19thc‌-artworldwide‌.org‌ /spring‌_04‌/articles‌/floy‌_print‌.html. 26. Auguste-Jean-Marie Vermorel, Ces dames, Physionomies parisiennes (Paris: Tous les Librairies, 1860), 99–101. 27. Letter to Mrs. Constance Leslie, n.d. Leslie Papers K/6/1, Typescript in Watts Gallery, Compton; cited in Veronica Franklin Gould, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 66. Gould notes that it was reported that his “first thought was to adopt her.” A similar claim was made in the Divorce Proceedings, March 13, 1877, High Court of Justice, Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division. 28. David Loshak, “G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry,” Burlington Magazine 105, no. 728 (1963): 476––87, 483. 29. See Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson, 1908), 89. 30. Gagnier, “Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice,” 23. 31. Tracy C. Davis, “Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London,” Theatre Research International 13, no. 3 (1998): 221–24. 32. Julius Althaus, “A Lecture on the Physiology and Pathology of the Olfactory Nerve,” Lancet 1 (1881): 771–73 and 813–15, 722. 33. In a letter to Mrs. Senior, he outlined his wish for Ellen to pursue “a profession less repugnant to my taste”; cited in Gould, G. F. Watts, 74. 34. Undated letter, cited in ibid., 74. In the deed of separation, Watts cited “incompatibility of temper”; Terry, Story of My Life, 64. 35. Terry, Story of My Life, 53. 36. The deed of separation was signed on January 25, 1865, and the couple divorced in 1876. For more on the relationship, see Loshak, “G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry,” 476–87. 37. “Flower Odors,” 470–71. 38. Cranch, “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” 317. 39. On olfactory associations, see Mark Jenner, “Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture,” in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Howard Harrison, Paul Slack, and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 127–44; Classen, Color of Angels; and Annick Le Guérer, Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). 40. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 84.

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Notes to Pages 30–33

41. On smell and aesthetics, see Drobnick and Fisher, “Perfumatives,” 1–6, and Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets, “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (2007): 273–86. See also Le Guérer, Scent, 141–203, and Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 11–37. 42. P. R. Bell, Darwin’s Biological Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 151–56. 43. On the olfactory in European literature, see Rindisbacher, Smell of Books. On perfume in Victorian aesthetic writings, see Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility. On perfume in French decadent literature, see Krueger, “Decadent Perfume.” On smell in Zola and other French literature, see Stephen Kern, “Olfactory Ontology and Scented Harmonies: On the History of Smell,” Journal of Popular Culture 7, no. 4 (1974): 816–24. 44. Jim Drobnick, “Towards an Olfactory Art History: The Mingled, Fatal, and Rejuvenating Perfumes of Paul Gauguin,” Senses and Society 7, no. 2 (2015): 196–208, https://‌doi‌.org‌/10‌.275 2‌/174589312X13276628771569. 45. Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 212. 46. Lizzie Ostrom, Perfume: A Century of Scents (London: Hutchinson, 2015), 40. 47. Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet; Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances (San Francisco: John Howell, 1920), 79. 48. Sadakichi Hartmann, Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes (New York: n.p, 1897), 23. 49. Nurva Powder is a mild-scented incense made from fragrant woods and Indian herbs; ibid., 19. 50. Christina Bradstreet, “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes: Sadakichi Hartmann’s Perfume Concert, 1902,” in di Bello and Koureas, Art, History and the Senses, 51–65. 51. Sadakichi Hartmann, “In Perfume Land,” Forum 50 (1913): 217–28, 224. 52. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891; repr., Penguin: London, 1994), 154. 53. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (1884; repr., Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998), 93. 54. Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing, 25. 55. Cited in Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 120.

56. Théophile Thoré-Bürger, “L’art des parfums,” L’Ariel (1836), quoted in Louise Bulkley Dillingham, The Creative Imagination of Théophile Gautier: A Study in Literary Psychology (Princeton: Princeton Psychology Review, 1927), 207. Thoré-Bürger became one of France’s most distinguished art critics, renowned for his “rediscovery” of Dutch artists such as Vermeer and Hals and for his support for Courbet and Manet over Academy painters. 57. F. W. Leakey, Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 215. 58. Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 21. 59. Leakey, Baudelaire and Nature, 215. 60. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 37, 84. 61. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal,” Spectator 35, no. 1784 (September 6, 1862): 998–1000, and Thomas J. Brennan, “Creating from Nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in Ave Atque Vale,” Victorian Poetry 44, no. 3 (2006): 251–71. 62. Later in that letter, Swinburne confirmed his “patent objection to the word smell” as a conclusion to a couplet in Rossetti’s “Jenny,” which he left hanging as: “Fresh flower, scarce touch with signs that tell / Of love’s exuberant hotbed:—— .” Although they found “smell” too prosaic to complete this couplet, both men became occupied by the representation of scent in their artistic creations. “A. C. Swinburne to D. G. Rossetti, December 22, 1869,” in Cecil Y. Lang, The Yale Edition of Swinburne’s Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 73. 63. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, trans. Matthew Beaumont (1873; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), cited in Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 275. See also Catherine Maxwell, “Paterian Flair: Walter Pater and Scent,” Pater Newsletter 61, no. 62 (2012): 21–42, and Matthew Kaiser, “Pater’s Mouth,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011): 47–64. 64. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 275. 65. “Un nouvel art: L’osphrétique,” L’Illustration, July 17, 1844, 294 [my translation]. On the eighteenth-century French origins of the perfume organ, see Natalie Wourm, “The Smell of God: Scent Trails from Ficino to Baudelaire,” in Sense and Scent: An Exploration of Olfactory Meaning, ed. Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham (Dublin: Philomel, 2003), 93–95.

Notes to Pages 35–42 66. Jacques Babinet, Études et lectures sur les sciences d’observation (Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1858), 183. 67. Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 18 and 188. 68. Llewellyn Bullock, “The Fine Art of Fragrance,” National Review 2 (March 1891): 206–13. 69. Ibid., 212–13. 70. “Occasional Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, March 31, 1891, 2. 71. George William Septimus Piesse, The Art of Perfumery (London: Piesse and Lubin, 1855), 153. 72. Huysmans, Against Nature, 40. 73. Edward Dillon, “A Neglected Sense,” Nineteenth Century 35 (1894): 574–87, 577. See also J. A. Dewe, “The Science and Harmony of Smell,” Merry England 22 (1893): 123–28. 74. William D. Henry, “The American Perfumer,” Manufacturer and Builder 8, no. 3 (1876): 68. 75. The Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, had, in 1752, classed smells into seven groups (aromatic, fragrant, musky, garlicky, goaty, repulsive, and nauseous), but this was too broad to be of much use. Carolus Linnaeus, “Odores medicamentorum” (1756), cited in Lyall Watson, Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (New York: Norton, 1999), 3–5. 76. Fernand Papillon, “Odors and Life,” Popular Science Monthly 6 (1874): 142–57, 147. 77. Hendrik Zwaardemaker, in L’année psychologique (1898): 203, cited in Ellis, “Sexual Selection in Man,” 91. 78. On Lasswitz’s “Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins,” see William McCartney, Olfaction and Odours: An Osphresiological Essay (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1968), 186, and William B. Fischer, “German Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After,” Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 3 (1976): 254–65. 79. Hartmann, “In Perfume Land,” 217. 80. In fact, Hartmann rigged up fans placed behind scented cheesecloth. 81. “Newest Public Amusement,” New York Times, September 14, 1902, 32. 82. Ibid. 83. See “Barren Island, Odors Complaint,” New York Daily Tribune, July 18, 1902, 17. 84. “Perfume Concert Fails,” New York Times, December 1, 1902, 5. 85. “Comparisons Most Odorous,” New York Times, October 6, 1902, 8.

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86. Ibid. 87. Andrew Kettler, “Making the Synthetic Epic: Septimus Piesse, the Manufacturing of Mercutio Frangipani, and Olfactory Renaissance in Victorian England,” Senses and Society 10, no. 1 (2015): 5–25, 6–7. 88. On elevating the English olfactory sensorium, see ibid., 7. 89. Kettler exposes the fictional nature of this character; see ibid., 5–25. 90. Jeremy Maas, Victorian Fairy Painting (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), cat. 71. 91. “Mr Rimmel,” Art Journal 13 (1874): 374. For more on Rimmel’s creative publicity devices for perfume, see Richard Stamelman, Perfume, Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin: A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 86–87. 92. Eugene Rimmel, The Book of Perfumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 3. 93. Richard Stamelman, “The Eros—and Thanatos—of Scent,” in Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader, 184. 94. Stamelman, Perfume, Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin, 179. See also Stephan Jellinek, The Birth of Modern Perfume (Holzminden: Dragoco, Geberding, March 1998), 90. 95. Huysmans, Against Nature, 18. 96. Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 37–38. 97. See George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (London: Black, 1896), 65, and Sidney Colvin, “Fine Arts,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). 98. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 87. 99. Ibid., 83–84, 86. 100. Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 11. 101. Sidney Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” Fortnightly Review, October 1, 1867, 464–76, and Colvin, “Fine Arts,” 357. 102. Paul Broca, “Le grand lobe limbique et la scissure limbique dans la série des mammifères,” Revue d’anthropologie 2 (1878): 385–498, 386. 103. Paul Broca, “Sur la circonvolution limbique et la scissure limbique,” Bulletins Société d’anthropologie 2 (1877): 646–57, 648. 104. Grant Allen, “Sight and Smell in Vertebrates,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 6 (1881): 453–70. 105. Grant Allen, “The Dog’s Universe,” Gentleman’s Magazine (1880): 287–301. 106. Allen, “Sight and Smell in Vertebrates,” 470.

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Notes to Pages 42–51

107. In fact, humans have excellent olfactory abilities. See John P. McGann, “Poor Human Olfaction Is a 19th-Century Myth,” Science 356, no. 6338 (2017), https://‌science‌.sciencemag ‌.org‌/content‌/356‌/6338‌/eaam7263. 108. Henry T. Finck, “The Aesthetic Value of the Sense of Smell,” Atlantic Monthly 46, no. 278 (December 1880): 793–98, 793. 109. Ibid., 798. 110. Dillon, “Neglected Sense,” 577. 111. William Anderson, Catalogue of Specimens of Japanese Lacquer and Metal Work (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1894), 77. 112. Dillon, “Neglected Sense,” 576–77. 113. Frank Brinkley, Japan, Its History, Arts and Literature, 8 vols. (Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1901), 5. 114. Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heineman, 1892), 502. 115. Charles Henry Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses (London: Piesse and Lubin, 1887), 6. 116. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Sweet Scent of Decomposition,” in Forget Baudrillard?, ed. Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 25. 117. Carol Christ, “A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women,” in Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 142–62. 118. Annette Stott, “Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition,” American Art 6 (1992): 61–77. 119. Robin Spencer, “Whistler’s ‘The White Girl’: Painting, Poetry and Meaning,” Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1142 (1998): 300–11. 120. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004), 219. On the fecal overtones of perfume, see Mandy Aftel, “Perfumed Obsession,” in Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader, 214–15.

Chapter 2 1. Cranch, “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” 317. 2. See, for example, Bullock, “Fine Art of Fragrance,” 212–13; “Newest Public Amusement,” New York Times, September 14, 1902, 32. 3. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 200. 4. Nicholas Daly, “The Senses in Literature, 1800 to 1920: Industry and Empire,” in Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 168.

5. Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse IX,” in The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. John Burnet (1780; London: James Carpenter, 1842), 164–66, http://‌bit‌.ly‌/33X5nph. 6. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 200 and 58–59. 7. J. D. Campbell, ed., The Poetic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1924), 452. 8. See Kiechle, Smell Detectives, 7. Many British examples can be found at https://‌www ‌.britishnewspaperarchive‌.co‌.uk, e.g., “Local Improvements Act,” Sheffield Independent, September 12, 1846, 6; “Legislation Led by the Nose,” Tavistock Gazette, July 2, 1858, 1; and “The Anti-Stink Movement,” Kentish Mercury, August 29, 1874, 4. 9. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (Paris: Galignani, 1846), 28; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Woodfall, 1851). 10. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer,” Hansard, vol. 151, July 15, 1858, column 1508. 11. Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Fight Against Filth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 28, 33–34, 46, 48–51. 12. “The Scents of London,” The Atlas, August 21, 1852, 530. 13. Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 404n14. 14. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853; London: Norton, 1977), 137. 15. “The Senses: Part 3: Smell,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 12, no. 70 (March 1856): 494–501, 500. 16. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 20. 17. Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Phoenix Mill: The History Press, 1999), and Jonathan Ribner, “The Thames and Sin in the Age of the Great Stink: Some Artistic and Literary Responses to a Victorian Environmental Crisis,” British Art Journal 1, no. 2 (2000): 38–46. 18. “The Vampyre: No Superstition,” Punch 13 (1847): 143. 19. See Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 20. “Notes of the Week,” Illustrated London News, June 19, 1858, 603. 21. “The Last Man in the House,” Punch, July 10, 1858, 18.

Notes to Pages 51–59 22. Edwin Chadwick, The Report to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1842), 190, https://‌wellcomecollection‌ .org‌/works‌/vgy8svyj‌/items. See Ian Morley, “City Chaos, Contagions, Chadwick and Social Justice,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 80, no. 2 (2007), 61–72. 23. Edwin Chadwick, “Metropolitan Sewage Committee Proceedings,” Parliamentary Papers (1846): 10:651. 24. Girl at a Lattice sits in a tradition of Italian Renaissance paintings depicting a woman at a window. It may reflect Rossetti’s experience of miasma during the “Great Stink” of 1858 and the recent death of Elizabeth Siddall. 25. Caroline Purnell, The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses (New York: Norton, 2017), 31. 26. Ibid., 31–33. For more on Condillac, see Jütte, History of the Senses, 127–30. 27. Chadwick, Report . . . from the Poor Law Commissioners, 370. 28. Piesse, Art of Perfumery, 23. 29. George Augustus Sala, Twice Around the Clock: or, Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: J. and R. Maxwell, 1859), 274. 30. Gerald Griffin, The Christian Physiologist: Illustrative Tales of the Five Senses (London: Edward Bull, 1830), 16. 31. “The Senses,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 497. 32. Rosemary Ashton, One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 184. 33. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (London: BCA, 1984), 237. 34. “Analysis of the Thames,” The Public Ledger, August 13, 1858, 1. 35. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 36. Found was not exhibited or sold in Rossetti’s lifetime and remained unfinished on his death. 37. Rossetti lived at 14 Chatham Place from November 1852 to 1862. An open sewer on the River Fleet flowed into the Thames near the western end of Blackfriars Bridge.

247

38. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, vol. 2 (London: Ellis, 1895), 134. 39. Letter from Rossetti to Robert Bough, July 7, 1858, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman, 10 vols. (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–10), 2:219, and letter from Rossetti to Charles Eliot Norton, January 9, 1862, in Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism: 1854–1862, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: AMS Press, 1971), no. 154. 40. The graveyard wall was painted at Chiswick. Alastair Grieve notes that Rossetti began by modeling the scene on Blackfriars Bridge, but as this was demolished and rebuilt while he was working on it, he may have subsequently turned to the more old-fashioned London Bridge; Alastair Grieve, The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Norwich: Real World, 1976), 8. 41. Rossetti’s assistant, Henry Treffry Dunn, likely worked on the background after Rossetti’s death. 42. Ribner, “Thames and Sin,” 38–46. 43. According to Ovid, coral was petrified seaweed, formed at the instant that Perseus laid down the Gorgon Medusa’s head. 44. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 120–21. 45. “The Thames in Its True Colours,” Punch, July 3, 1858, 2. 46. Eileen Cleere, “Dirty Pictures: John Ruskin, Modern Painters, and the Victorian Sanitation of Fine Art,” Representations 78 (Spring 2002): 116–39, 131. 47. Ibid., 116–17. 48. Ibid., 116–17; Dehn Gilmore, The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 67, 186. 49. “Exhibitions—Royal Academy and British Institution,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 50 (September 1841): 351. On the influence of the Arnolfini Portrait on the Pre-Raphaelites, see Jenny Graham, Inventing van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age (Oxford: Berg, 2007). In 1846, Hunt was “startled by the difference” cleaning made to Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, a painting that he had copied a year or two earlier, which had struck him on his very first visit to the gallery in 1841 as being “as brown as my grandmother’s tea tray”; Judith

248

Notes to Pages 60–71

Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2006), 97. 50. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 81. 51. James Startin, A Lecture on Healthy Skin (London: Harrison, 1885), 5; “Cleanliness Versus Godliness,” Littell’s Living Age (September 1873), 243–56, 243. 52. Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20. 53. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 210. 54. Ibid., 30. 55. Eugenie Briot, “From Industry to Luxury: French Perfume in the Nineteenth Century,” Business History Review 85 (Summer 2011): 273–94; Ostrom, Perfume, 19–21. 56. Ostrom, Perfume, 9. 57. Linda Nochlin, Bathtime: Renoir, Cézanne, Daumier and the Practices of Bathing in Nineteenth-Century France, The Sixth Gerson Lecture (November 21, 1991) (Groningen: University of Groningen Press, 2018), https://‌books‌.ugp‌.rug‌.nl‌/index‌.php‌/ugp‌/catalog ‌/book‌/14. 58. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 4. 59. However, as Corbin explains, “smoke was a preoccupation less because it stank but more because it was blackish and opaque, attacked the lungs, dirtied the facades and darkened the atmosphere”; Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 155. 60. Jackson, Dirty Old London, 4–5. 61. “The Smells,” Punch, November 1, 1890, 206. 62. Rindisbacher, Smell of Books, 169–70, 186–87. On the deodorization of cities in the nineteenth century, see Jenner, “Follow Your Nose?,” 335–51. 63. On why London still stank around 1900, see Jackson, Dirty Old London, 1–2. 64. Cranch, “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” 318. 65. Cleere, “Dirty Pictures,” 122. 66. Charles Henry Piesse, “Odors and the Sense of Smell,” Popular Science Monthly 41 (1892): 682–90, 690. 67. On germ theory, see Allan Conrad Christensen, Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion (London: Routledge, 2005), 4.

68. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 223; See also David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 69. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 90. 70. Cranch, “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” 317. 71. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 290. 72. Nancy Tomes, “The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygiene, and the Germ Theory, 1870–1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1900): 509–39. 73. Jenner, “Follow Your Nose?,” 346. 74. Frederick William Burbidge, The Book of the Scented Garden (London: Lane, 1905), 13. 75. On the table beside the girl is a box of Papier d’Arménie, with packaging testifying to the gold medals awarded to the manufacturers at the Universal Exhibition of 1889. Leaflets proclaim the cleansing properties of benzoin and its power to purify the air. 76. Edwin Godfrey Aitchley, History and the Use of Incense in Divine Worship (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909): 16, 207, 271. 77. Stamelman, Perfume, Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin, 163. 78. William Farr, “Causes of the High Mortality in Town Districts,” Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages (1844), cited in John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 70. 79. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 299. 80. M. Willis, “Dracula, Miasma and Germ Theory,” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 3 (2007): 201–25. 81. Alain Corbin, cited in Jütte, History of the Senses, 15. 82. Classen, “Odor of the Other,” 143. 83. On perfumed femme fatales, see ibid. 84. Frederick Graham Stephens, “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures,” Athenaeum, October 21, 1865, 546. 85. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 186. 86. William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 49.

Notes to Pages 71–84 87. Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 193. 88. Huysmans, Against Nature, 48. 89. Swinburne drew on the metaphor of the perfumed panther as temptress in his poem Laus Veneris; Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads (London: Moxon, 1866), 14. 90. Le Guérer, Scent, 18–22; Classen, “Odor of the Other,” 144. 91. On perfumed panthers, see Le Guérer, Scent, 18–22, and Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993), 89. In Arthur Wardle’s The Enchantress (1901), leopards are lured to the scent of a woman, as if her magic trumps their powers of enticement. 92. Huysmans, Against Nature, 48. 93. Helen Paterson, ed., Letters to William Allingham (London: Longmans, 1911), 290. 94. George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 422. 95. Jonathan Ribner, The Poetics of Pollution in Turner, Whistler, Monet (London: Tate, 2004), 53. 96. On Monet’s love of smog, see Richard Thomson, Monet and Architecture (London: National Gallery, 2018), 171–90. 97. Cited in Lara Feigel, A Nosegay: A Literary Journey from the Fragrant to the Fetid (London: Old Street Publishing, 2006), 51. 98. Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 113.

Chapter 3 1. Sargent had first painted a smaller watercolor of the same name. 2. Stamelman, Perfume, Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin, 17. 3. Connor, Book of Skin, 211. 4. Edwin G. Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (London: Appleton-Century, 1942), 440. 5. Papillon, “Odors and Life,” 144. 6. John Berry Haycraft, “The Sense of Smell,” in Text Book of Physiology, vol. 1, ed. E. A. Schäfer (Edinburgh: Pentland, 1900), 1146–1258, 1218. 7. Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 152. 8. Amy King, “Reorienting the Scientific Frontier: Victorian Tide Pools and Literary Realism,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 153–63, 154. 9. Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet, 1860).

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10. Joseph Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 97. 11. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (New York: Routledge, 1996), 85. 12. The Investigator, “Will It Ever Be Possible to Map a Smell?” The Times, September 29, 1854, 9, col. A. 13. “Fragrance Visible,” Punch 27 (1854): 140. 14. See H. Zwaardemaker, “On Measurement of the Sense of Smell in Clinical Examination,” Lancet 133, no. 3435 (June 1889): 1300–1302; “The Action of Light upon Perfumes,” Scientific American Supplement 42, no. 1085 (October 17, 1896): 17338. On the “odorscope,” see William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson, The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), 81, and Frank Lewis Dyer, Edison: His Life and Inventions, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1910), 590. 15. Andrew Jackson Davis, Death and the After-Life (New York: A. J. Davis, 1866), 68. 16. Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art Journal 62 (2003): 18–30, 22. 17. Davis, Death and the After-Life, 68. 18. The lecture was published in Burbidge, Book of the Scented Garden, 24. 19. On the topos of the five senses, see Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 1–23. 20. Quiviger, Sensory World of Renaissance Art, 127. 21. There are many examples of falling, fluttering petals in nineteenth-century art, such as Henri Fantin-Latour’s epitaph Immortality (1889), in which an angel drops blossoms over Eugène Delacroix’s tomb. 22. Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary; Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 163. 23. On the semen-like smell of horse chestnut flowers, see Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilisation (London: Rebman, 1908), 626. 24. A rare example of an early twentieth-century “five senses” painting is Winifred Sandys, The Five Senses (1911–12). 25. On the Glasgow Four, see Timothy Neat, Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and

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Notes to Pages 87–100

Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994). The Glasgow Four were Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frances Macdonald McNair, and James Herbert McNair. 26. Ostrom, Perfume, 30. 27. Ibid., 31. 28. Ibid., 30. 29. De Morgan returned to this theme in Boreas and the Fallen Leaves (1919). See also the whipped-up petals in Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s Youth and the Lady (before 1905). 30. Classen, “Art and the Senses,” 193. 31. See also Rajah (1897), a color lithograph by the Belgian designer Henri Meunier. 32. Nicholas Vaschide and Marinus Anthonie Van Melle, “Une nouvelle hypothèse sur la nature des conditions physiques de l’odorat,” Comptes rendus Société de biologies 129, no. 26 (1899): 1285–87. 33. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (May 11, 1912), discussed in Jane Sharp, “Sounds, Noises, and Smells: Sensory Experience in Futurist Art,” in The Futurist Imagination: Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage, and Free-Word Poetry, ed. Anne Coffin Hanson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 67–80. 34. David Howes, “Introduction,” in Empire of the Senses, 11. 35. Carlo Carrà, “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umberto Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 151. On smell in Futurist painting, see Caro Verbeek, “Scented Colours: The Role of Olfaction in Futurism and Olfactory (Re-)constructions,” in Heywood, Sensory Arts and Design, 107–21. 36. Carrà, “Painting of Sounds,” 152. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 153. 39. Cited in Classen, Color of Angels, 128. 40. “The Collection of Lydia Winston Malbin,” Sotheby’s Sale Catalogue, May 16, 1990, lot 6. 41. On the influence of Art Nouveau upon Italian Divisionism, see Vivien Greene, Divisionism / Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy (New York: Guggenheim, 2007). 42. Annie Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography (London: Fisher Unwin, 1893), ch. 3, http://‌www‌.gutenberg‌.org‌/files‌/12085‌ /12085‌-h‌/12085‌-h‌.htm‌#CHIII. On the

symbolist intentions of Italian Divisionism, see Simonetta Fraquelli and Giovanni Ginex, eds., Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891–1910 (London: National Gallery, 2009). 43. See comment by kihm, “Incense, 1910,” Read, Seen, Heard, https://‌kihm2‌.wordpress ‌.com‌/2016‌/01‌/09‌/incense‌-1910/, accessed June 8, 2020. The Theosophical Society of London is unable to verify this and the painting is no longer in their collection. 44. Teresa Fiori, Archivi del Divisionismo, vol. 1 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1968), 99. 45. Ibid., 89. 46. Béla Takách’s Incense was featured in Penrose’s Pictorial Album, 16 (1910): 112. 47. Rindisbacher, Smell of Books, 1.

Chapter 4 1. Charles Courtney Curran, “Picture Notes,” Palette and Bench 1, no. 3 (1908): 54–56, 56. 2. Ibid., 56. 3. Charles Courtney Curran, “Class in Oil Painting,” Palette and Bench 1, no. 5 (1909), 100. 4. See Scott’s Yellow Roses (1909), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 5. Curran, “Class in Oil Painting,” 100. 6. Ibid. 7. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), 334. 8. Ibid., 339. 9. Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science: A Compendium of Psychology and Ethics (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 103. 10. George Henry Lewes, The Problems of Life and Mind (London: Trübner and Co., 1874), 257. 11. Bain, Senses and the Intellect, 411. 12. Ibid., 338. 13. Carlisle, Common Scents, 122. 14. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Intellectual Life (London: Macmillan, 1875), 37. 15. Ibid., 40. 16. Reuben Post Halleck, The Education of the Central Nervous System (New York: Macmillan, 1886), 122. 17. Ibid., 154; Bain, Senses and the Intellect, 411. 18. Halleck, Education, 241. 19. Ibid., 138; Finck, “Aesthetic Value,” 798. 20. Halleck, Education, 154.

Notes to Pages 101–109 21. Ibid., 19. 22. Ibid., 113. 23. Ibid., 122. 24. Ibid., 154. 25. Bell, Darwin’s Biological Work, 151–56. 26. Halleck, Education, 137. 27. Nordau, Degeneration, 502–4. 28. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), 200 and 47; George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859), 49. See also Kate Flint, “The Social Life of the Senses: The Assaults and Seductions of Modernity,” in Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 25–47, 25. 29. On Nordau and neurasthenia, see Jütte, History of the Senses, 185. 30. Anne Stiles, Neurology and Literature: 1860–1920 (London: Palgrave, 2007). 31. Michelle Stacey, The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery (New York: Putnam, 2002). 32. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), 207. 33. “Lived on Perfume of Roses: Aesthetic Effect of a Car Accident on a Chicago Woman,” New York Times, January 21, 1905, 1. 34. On perfume therapeutics, see “Health-Giving Perfumes: From the Boston Transcript,” New York Times, July 1, 1894, 21. 35. Buchanan, “Fleshly School of Poetry,” 334–50. 36. Claude-François Lallemand, Des pertes séminales involontaires (Paris: Béchat, 1842). 37. Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 213. 38. Buchanan, “Fleshly School of Poetry,” 38. 39. William James Dawson, The Makers of Modern English: A Popular Handbook to the Greater Poets of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1890), 55. James Coulson Kernahan, “Rossetti and the Moralists,” The Fortnightly Review 291 (March 1891): 406. (London: Ward, Lock, 1894), 55. 40. John Campbell Shairp, “Aesthetic Poetry,” The Contemporary Review 42 (July 1882): 21. 41. L. H. Caine, “A Child’s Recollection of Rossetti,” New Review 2 (1894): 246–55. 42. Piesse, Art of Perfumery, 96. 43. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 74. Corbin cites Albert Hagen, Die sexuelle Osphresiologie (Charlottenburg: Barsdorf, 1901), 226.

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44. Piesse, Art of Perfumery, 100; Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 29. 45. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 2. 46. Ibid., 36. 47. Ibid., 14. 48. Ibid., 28, 40–41. 49. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (1864; Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1999), 19. 50. Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, 2:49, 212. 51. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, 27. 52. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 163. See also Francis Galton, “Statistics of Mental Imagery,” Mind 19 (1880): 304. In the latter work, Galton reported that men of intellect were unable to conjure mental images, and that Academicians painted from the idea without resort to the visual imagination. 53. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 102. Letters to Galton from Rose Kingsley and Charles Kingsley are in the Wellcome Library. For a brief biography of Rose Kingsley, see http://‌lakechapalaartists‌.com‌/?p‌=455. 54. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 165. 55. Ibid., 165–67. 56. Toulouse and Vaschide, “Mesure de l’odorat,” 381–83. This study was widely reported in the British press. 57. E. Goodall and M. Craig, “The Insanity of the Climacteric Period,” Journal of Mental Science (1894): 237. 58. Frank Podmore, “Olfactory Hallucinations Associated with Subconscious Visual Perceptions,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 12 (1906): 188–90. 59. Ibid., 189. Might the painting have been Vasily Vereshchagin’s The Apotheosis of War (1871), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, Bond Street, in 1887? 60. Podmore, “Olfactory Hallucinations,” 189. 61. Ibid. 62. James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 105–7. 63. “The Society of Painters in Water Colours,” The Times, April 28, 1856, 12; The Scotsman, March 19, 1856, 3; “Art,” Spectator, January 10, 1885, 14. 64. Papillon, “Odors and Life,” 147. This story was previously told in J. Hippolyte Cloquet, Osphrésiologie ou traité des odeurs, du sens et des organes de l’olfaction (Paris: Mequignon-Marvis, 1821), 80.

252

Notes to Pages 109–117

65. Papillon, “Odors and Life,” 147. 66. Bain, Senses and the Intellect, 62. 67. See Carl Munger, “Parosmia: With History of a Peculiar Case,” The Laryngoscope 14 (1904), 384–86, 384; Jonathan Hutchinson, “On Subjective Aberrations of the Sense of Smell,” Archives of Surgery, vol. 2 (London: Churchill, 1891), 302–5; Herbert Tilley, “Three Cases of Parosmia,” Lancet (1895), 907–8; and Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions (London: Scott, 1897), 28. 68. St. John F. Bullen, “Olfactory Hallucinations of the Insane,” Journal of Mental Science 45 (1899): 513–33, 528. 69. Daniel Hack Tuke, “Smell, Hallucination,” in A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, vol. 2, ed. Henry George Savage (London: Churchill, 1892), 1175. Electricity was sometimes described as having a phosphorous or sulfurous odor. See “Electricity and Odors,” The Digest 31, no. 24 (1905): 875. 70. Henry Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (London: Macmillan, 1867), 248. See also Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions, 28. 71. Bullen, “Olfactory Hallucinations,” 524. 72. John Hughlings Jackson and Charles E. Beevor, “Case of Tumour of the Right TemporoSphenoidal Lobe Bearing on the Localisation of the Sense of Smell and on the Interpretation of a Particular Variety of Epilepsy,” Brain 12 (1890): 346–57, 351. 73. Goodall and Craig, “Insanity of the Climacteric Period,” 237. 74. Bullen, “Olfactory Hallucinations,” 513–33. 75. Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 14. 76. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, ed. Dale M. Bauer (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 42. 77. The rest cure was advocated by the American physician Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, to whom Gilman sent a copy of the story; Julie B. Dock, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the History of Its Publication and Reception (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1988), 89. 78. Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, 48. 79. The Investigator, “Will It Ever Be Possible to Map a Smell?” The Times, September 29, 1854, 9, col. A. 80. Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, 51.

81. Ibid., 55. 82. Ibid., 54. Susan Lanser has argued that the term “yellow” had connotations of disease, ugliness, inferiority, and decay for nineteenth-century American readers; Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 415–441, 429. 83. Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, 53. 84. The mention of sulfur might also be a reference to concerns surrounding toxic wallpaper following the realization in the 1850s and 1860s that a popular green wallpaper contained arsenic pigments. 85. Daniel Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body (London: Churchill, 1872), 252. 86. Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, 54. 87. Despite claiming that the wallpaper is the source, she considers “burning the house—to reach the smell” (ibid., 54). 88. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” Forerunner 4 (1913): 271. 89. Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper, 54. 90. Ibid. John’s cautions are informed by psychology. In Illusions, Sully warned that “the best of us are liable to become the victims of absurd illusion if we habitually allow our imaginations to become overheated, whether by furious passion or by excessive indulgence in the pleasures of day-dreaming”; see Sully, Illusions, 118. 91. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism,” 415–41. 92. Cited in ibid., 431. 93. Carlisle, Common Scents, 21. 94. “The Royal Academy,” Canterbury Journal, Kentish Times and Farmers’ Gazette, Saturday, May 12, 1888, 6.

Chapter 5 1. Malcom Warner, “John Everett Millais’s ‘Autumn Leaves,’” in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. Leslie Paris, 126–42 (London: Tate, 1984), 131. 2. Alfred Tennyson, The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1862; repr., London: The Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), 24. See Nic Peeters, “Scent and Sensibility: An Appreciation of Millais’s Autumn Leaves,” Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 37–50. 3. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, May 10, 1856, 589–90. 4. George Sand, Histoire de ma vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 557.

Notes to Pages 119–133 5. Maine de Biran (1815), cited in Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 201. 6. Cited in Warner, “John Everett Millais’s ‘Autumn Leaves,’” 161. 7. Cited in Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 3. 8. Ibid., 158. 9. Charles Baudelaire, “A Phantom,” 1861, translated in William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). 10. Warner, “John Everett Millais’s ‘Autumn Leaves,’” 128. 11. Kate Flint, “Feeling, Affect, Melancholy, Loss: Millais’s Autumn Leaves and the Siege of Sebastopol,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 23 (2016), http://‌dx ‌.doi‌.org‌/10‌.16995‌/ntn‌.774; On Millais’s Crimean pictures, see Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Millais (London: Tate, 2008), 100–104. 12. Jason Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais (London: Phaidon Press, 2012), 97. 13. On geraniums and the Victorian language of flowers, see Rosenfeld and Smith, Millais, 99. 14. John Ruskin, Royal Academy Notes (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), 66. 15. John Everett Millais, letter to F. G. Stephens, Stephens Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, cited in Warner, “John Everett Millais’s ‘Autumn Leaves,’” 156. 16. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Macmillan, 1905), 286. 17. Warner, “John Everett Millais’s ‘Autumn Leaves,’” 140. 18. Charles Kingsley, “My Winter Garden,” Fraser’s Magazine (1858): 412–13. 19. Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (London: Macmillan, 1857; reprint, 1898), 55. 20. On literature, see Francis Jacox, “Scent Memories,” Bentley’s Miscellany 54 (1863): 360–66. 21. “The Senses,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 494. 22. Jacox, “Scent Memories,” 364. 23. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, January 26–27, 1883, Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum, letter 305, inventory no. b284 v/1962. 24. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Anthon van Rappard, The Hague, Thursday, January 25,

253

1883, Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum, letter 30, inventory no. B8358 a-b v/2006. On Pinwell’s The Sisters, see Lynn M. Alexander, Women, Work and Representation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 197. 25. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1858), 63. 26. On “mummy unwrappings,” see Classen, Museum of the Senses, 47–71. 27. Holmes, Autocrat, 63. 28. “Flower Odors,” 469–72. 29. Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting: Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene (London: Andreas Papadakis, 2000), 54. 30. Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 32–34. 31. William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 31–32. 32. Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005), 86. 33. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 182. 34. Birmingham Post, May 25, 1897; cited in Simon Toll, Herbert Draper, 1862–1920: A Life Study (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1988), 81. 35. Tuke, Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, ii. 36. Cranch, “Plea for the Sense of Smell,” 317. 37. Holmes, Autocrat, 64. 38. “The Senses,” Harpers’ New Monthly Magazine, 500. 39. Ibid. 40. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 134. 41. Kate Flint, Flash!: Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 60. 42. J. B. Bullen, “Raising the Dead: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Willowwood’ Sonnets,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 439. 43. Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Edwin Becker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2003), 80. 44. Clyde K. Hyder, Swinburne as Critic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 133. 45. Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–1882: The Paintings and Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné (London: Clarendon Press, 1971), no. 168.

254

Notes to Pages 133–144

46. Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone, The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain (1860–1910) (London: Tate, 1997), 156. 47. Jacox, “Scent Memories,” 364. 48. Lucinda Hawksley, The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: Andre Deutsch, 2004), 71, 193–95. 49. Daniel Dunglas Home, Incidents in My Life (London: n.p., 1863), 181. 50. Frederic W. H. Myers, “The Experiences of W. Stainton Moses,” Proceedings of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 11 (1896–97): 24–113, 48. 51. Ibid., 59. On scents at séances, see Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, vol. 1 (London: Bentley, 1887), 383. For the “charnel house” smell of a spirit, see Florence Marryat, There Is No Death (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1891), 151. 52. Raffaele Monti, I macchiaioli (Florence: Giunti, 1987), 5. 53. Samuel M. Warns, “Odors,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 61 (1898): 269. 54. Ibid., 272. 55. Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 65. 56. Vernon Lee, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: Heinemann, 1890), ix. The aroma of herbs in the yellow drawing room indicates the ghosts of Alice and the highwayman in Vernon Lee, The Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1886), 64. 57. Lee, Hauntings, ix–x. On fragrant herbs and death, see Trollope, What I Remember, 73. 58. Cited in Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 156–58. 59. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 643. 60. Eliot merged the rhetorics of telepathy, miasma, and contagion in The Lifted Veil as early as 1859, one year after the Great Stink. Derek Woods, “Sanitation and Telepathy: George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 1 (2017): 55–76. By 1907, olfactory telepathy was commonplace in the spiritualist writings of the period. 61. “Letter to the Editor,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1907): 436–39. 62. On ionone, see Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (London: Phoenix, 2000): 11.

63. Charles Webster Leadbeater, The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (Madras: The Theosophist Office, 1911), 91. 64. Alfred Percy Sinnet, Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1913); Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry (Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1951), 381. 65. Classen, Cultural History of the Senses, 18. 66. Rimmel, Book of Perfumes, 132. 67. Ibid., 12. 68. Others disapproved. The French naturalist and physiologist Fernand Papillon observed in 1874 that “odors which disgust us, like that of asafoetida and of the valerian-root, are on the contrary highly enjoyed by the Orientals,” while their preference for scents such as civet, lily, tuberose, and patchouli might provoke “violent haemorrhage” in “Western sensibilities”; Papillon, “Odors and Life,” 153. 69. Will S. Monroe, “A Study of Taste Dreams,” American Journal of Psychology 10 (1899), 326. 70. Alice Heywood and Helen Vortriede, “Some Experiments on the Associative Power of Smells,” American Journal of Psychology 16 (1905): 537–41. 71. Edward Titchener and E. M. Bolger, “Some Experiments on the Associative Power of Smells,” American Journal of Psychology 18 (1907): 326–27. 72. J. Harris, “On the Associative Power of Odors,” American Journal of Psychology 19, no. 4 (1908): 557–61. 73. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), 51. 57. 74. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Gordon M. Shepherd, “Madeleines and Neuromodernism: Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory in Proust,” Auto / Biography Studies 13, no. 1 (1998): 39–60, 43. 75. Proust, Swann’s Way, 49–50. 76. Shepherd-Barr and Shepherd, “Madeleines and Neuromodernism,” 43. 77. For an example of a scent-invoked plot, see Margaret Elenora Tupper, The Scent of the Heather (London: Leadenhall, 1895). 78. Paul Broca, “Anatomie du lobe olfactif,” Bulletins Société d’Anthropologie 4 (1879): 75–81. 79. Nordau, Degeneration, 503. 80. Ibid., 13 and 11.

Notes to Pages 144–154 81. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, translated by Brendan King (1880; London: Dedalus European Classics, 2004), 160. 82. Paul Bourget, “Paris Letter,” The Academy, July 31, 1880, 7. 83. Huysmans, Against Nature, 85. 84. Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989): 234–65. 85. Huysmans, Against Nature, 96. 86. “Effects of Sensory Stimuli on the Hallucinations of Hystero-epilepsy,” American Journal of Insanity, July 1891, 128.

Chapter 6 1. Wourm, “Smell of God,” 79–101. 2. Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (New York: Berg, 2007), 61. 3. Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses, 3. 4. Jütte, History of the Senses, 231, and Classen, “Breath of God,” 376. 5. Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses, 161. 6. Ernest Monin, Les odeurs du corps humain (Paris: n.p., 1886), 16. 7. Gustav Jaeger, Dr. Jaeger’s Essays on Health-Culture (London: Waterloo, 1887), 268. On his being called the “soul sniffer,” see Jütte, History of the Senses, 231. On Grossmith see “Where England Holds Its Own,” Review of Reviews, 1903, 547–551, 548. 8. Charles Bell and John Bell, The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body, 4th ed. (1797; London: Longmans, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816), 2. 9. “The Senses,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 498 and 494. 10. Ellis, “Sexual Selection in Man,” 55. 11. Burbidge, Book of the Scented Garden, 24. 12. Spiritus rector was described in Cloquet, Osphrésiologie, 3. 13. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89. 14. Hugh Macmillan, The Ministry of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1871), 26. 15. Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66.

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16. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, May 10, 1856, 589–90. 17. John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1899), 240. 18. Millais, Life and Letters, 1:238–39; cited in Flint, Victorians, 82. 19. Rosenfeld and Smith, Millais, 102. 20. Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, 2:212. 21. George Sexton, The Physiology of the Five Senses (London: Austin, 1869), 3. 22. Amanda Nichola Bergen, “The Blind, the Deaf and the Halt: Physical Disability, the Poor Law and Charity ca. 1830–1890” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2004). 23. Barlow, Time Present and Time Past, 71. 24. Max Schulz, Paradise Preserved: Recreations in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 262. 25. Barlow, Time Present and Time Past, 71. 26. Cited in Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 128. 27. Ibid., 102. 28. Lesley Hulonce, “Pauper Children and Poor Law Childhoods in England and Wales, 1834–1910,” https://‌roundedglobe‌.com‌/html‌ /3b3a9a73‌-0518‌-487e‌-86b0‌-98d4c10f9af5‌/en‌ /Pauper‌%20Children‌%20and‌%20Poor‌%20 Law‌%20Childhoods‌%20in‌%20England‌%20 and‌%20Wales‌%201834‌-1910‌/#fn788. 29. Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 128. 30. Heather Tilley, “Portraying Blindness: Nineteenth-Century Images of Tactile Reading,” Disability Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2018), doi: 10.18061/dsq.v38i3.6475. 31. Ibid. 32. Rosenfeld and Smith, Millais, 102. 33. J. E. Phythian, Millais (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), 64. 34. Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate, 2012), 108. 35. On symbolic boundaries and blindness, see Julia Miele Rodas, “Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability,” Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51–97.

256

Notes to Pages 154–162

36. “Flower Odors,” 471. 37. George P. Landow, “The Rainbow: A Problematic Image,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoeplmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 364. 38. Flint, Victorians, 81. 39. Mary Ann O’Farrell, “Blindness Envy: Victorians in the Parlors of the Blind,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (2012): 512–25, 514. 40. Lesley Williams, “The Look of Little Girls: John Everett Millais and the Victorian Art Market,” in The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 132. 41. The church was originally dedicated to Thomas Becket but by the 1800s this had changed to the apostle Thomas. 42. Cited in Barringer, Rosenfeld, and Smith, Pre-Raphaelites, 108. 43. Millais, Life and Letters, 1:225; Robert Snow, “The Blind Girl,” in Memoirs of a Tour and Miscellaneous Poems (London: Pickering, 1845), 247. 44. Millais, Life and Letters, 1:233. 45. Snow submitted a query in 1850. 46. Millais, Life and Letters, 1:238. 47. See Jarltzberg, “Odour from the Rainbow,” Notes and Queries 73 (1851): 224; C. Forbes, “Odour from the Rainbow,” Notes and Queries 77 (April 1851): 310. 48. Cited in Raymond Lee and Alistair Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth and Science (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), 89. 49. Ibid., 90. 50. Ibid., 91. 51. James Manning Sherwood, “The Rainbow as a Symbol of Christ,” Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly Devoted to Religious and Useful Literature, October 1865, 526. 52. Schulz, Paradise Preserved, 264. 53. Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 44. 54. Barringer, Rosenfeld, and Smith, Pre-Raphaelites, 111–12. 55. Rosenfeld and Smith, Millais, 46. 56. Deborah A. Green, The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 9, 187, 205. 57. Colin Cruise, “‘Pressing All Religions into His Service’: Solomon’s Ritual Paintings and Their Contexts,” in Love Revealed: Simeon

Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Colin Cruise (London: Merrell, 2006), 57. 58. Ibid., 63. 59. See John Francis Bloxam, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” The Chameleon, December 1894; David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (1982): 181–210; Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6. 60. David Kent, “High Church Rituals and Rituals of Protest: The Riots at St George-inthe-East, 1859–60,” London Journal 32, no. 3 (2007): 145–66. 61. The Times, October 19, 1866, 6. 62. Margaret Farrand Thorp, Charles Kingsley, 1819–1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 154. 63. The Times, October 19, 1866, 6. 64. Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Phaidon, 2011), 14. 65. Dominic Janes, “Seeing and Tasting the Divine: Simeon Solomon’s Homoerotic Sacrament,” in di Bello and Koureas, Art, History and the Senses, 36. 66. On the ingestion of incense as a communal experience, see Mark Graham, “Queer Smells: Fragrances of Late Capitalism or Scents of Subversion?,” in Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader, 316. 67. “The Dudley Gallery,” The Architect, February 6, 1869, 79. 68. On “bells and smells,” see James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 89–90; Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70–74; Nigel Yates, “Bells and Smells: London, Brighton and South Coast Religion Reconsidered,” Southern History 5 (1983): 122–54; Atchley, History and the Use of Incense, 112. 69. “In the Arches Court: Martin v Mackonochie,” The Law Reports (Admiralty and Ecclesiastical Cases), March 28, 1868, 211–15; “The St Alban’s Case,” The Times, January 28, 1869, 12; and Timothy Richard Stratford, “Urban Liturgy in the Church of England: A Historical, Theological and Anthropological Analysis of the Mid Victorian Slum Priest Ritualists and Their Legacy” (PhD diss., University of Sheffield, April 2008), 46. 70. Athenaeum, February 6, 1869, 215.

Notes to Pages 162–173 71. Alan Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 97. 72. Caroline Conroy, “Images of Desire: Twenty Sketches by Simeon Solomon,” PRS Review 24, no. 3 (2016): 28–43, 33. 73. In Christianity, myrtle symbolizes the Garden of Eden and Mary’s virginity, while for Saint Gregory it was the symbol of moderation and self-control. 74. Caroline Conroy, “The Works of Simeon Solomon in the Hugh Lane Gallery,” in Hugh Lane: That Great Pictured Song, ed. Jessica O’Donnell (Dublin: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 2017), 73. 75. Cruise, Love Revealed, 136; Wilton and Upstone, Age of Rossetti, 140. “The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art II,” Christie’s London, February 29, 2003, lot 132. 76. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love’ and Other Studies,” Dark Blue 1 (July 1871): 574. 77. Caroline Conroy, “Mingling with the Ungodly: Simeon Solomon in Queer London,” in Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c. 1850 to the Present, ed. Katherine Graham and Simon Avery (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 195. 78. Heliogabalus’s palace was strewn with roses, lilies, violets, hyacinths, and narcissus and his pool was scented with saffron during his short, corrupt reign. Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses, 143. 79. “Our Rising Artists: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale,” Magazine of Art 26 (1902): 256–60, 260. 80. Edith Sichel, “A Woman Painter and Symbolism,” Monthly Review 4 (1901): 101–14, 114. 81. The catalogue text is gummed to the back of the painting. 82. Fortescue-Brickdale’s title is a misquotation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, IV.i, 156–57: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” The painting references the semi-material presence of the imagination in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s poem “Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of” (1897), which describes “the cloudy shapes that float and lie / within this magic globe we call the brain.” Wentworth Thomas Higginson, “Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of,” Century Magazine 32 (1897): 405.

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83. A Welsh Spinster, “A Girl-Painter and Her Paintings,” The Girl’s Own Annual 23 (1901): 6. 84. From the catalogue text affixed to the back of the painting. 85. Macmillan, Ministry of Nature, 33. 86. Fortescue-Bricksdale may have had in mind Edmund Spenser’s poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. 87. See the catalogue text affixed to the back of the painting. 88. Natural magic was revived in the early nineteenth century by Daniel Brewster. It is a theme within Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), with its focus on the life force. 89. Le Guérer, Scent, 7.

Chapter 7 1. “The Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 3524 (May 11, 1895), 615. 2. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), 25. 3. See the cartoon of Gibson Girl Kate, Mary Evans Picture Library, Picture no. 10425295. 4. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903), chap. 4. 5. Kim E. Nielsen, Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 130–36. 6. “Origins: History: AT&T,” https://‌web ‌.archive‌.org‌/web‌/20120820015455‌/http://‌www‌ .corp‌.att‌.com. 7. Keller, World I Live In, facing 70. 8. “Helen Keller with a Rose,” Century Magazine, January 1905, 454; Florence Earles Coates, “Helen Keller with a Rose,” Century Magazine, July 1905, 397. 9. Keller, World I Live In, 119. Although the magazine published the poem unillustrated, a letter from Coates to Century editor Richard Watson Gilder of March 12, 1905, states that Keller granted permission for the photograph to accompany the poem in print. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, “Coates, Florence Earle,” The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1886–1914,

258

Notes to Pages 174–185

https://‌digitalcollections‌.nypl‌.org‌/items‌/ab 8d1c90‌-6238‌-0134‌-2dec‌-00505686a51c. 10. See Sadakichi Hartmann, “The Work of Rudolf Eickemeyer,” The Photo-American 15, no. 7 (July 1904): 194–99. 11. Classen, “Art and the Senses,” 187. 12. Keller relied upon benefactors. Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 31. 13. In Britain in 1908, the Women’s Social and Political Union can be said to have disrupted the long-standing association of women with violets seen in works from Watts’s Choosing (1864; see fig. 5) to Henry Meynell Rheam’s watercolor Violets (1904). The suffragettes embroidered or pinned violets to their costumes to symbolize the vote—the green, white, and violet colors of their flag and uniform standing for “give women the vote.” 14. Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine, 25. 15. Stott, “Floral Femininity,” 68. 16. Marie Camille De G., “Beaux-Arts. Salon de 1834,” La Tribune des Femmes 2 (April 1834): 162–63, 169. 17. Stott, “Floral Femininity,” 68, 61, and Beverly Seaton, “Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification,” Poetics Today 10 (1989): 679–701. 18. Other Americans who studied in Paris and painted women smelling flowers include John White Alexander, William Merritt Chase, Henry Siddons Mowbray, and Lilla Cabot Perry. 19. Stott, “Floral Femininity,” 68, 61, and Seaton, “Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification.” 20. Charles Curran, The Perfume of Roses, Register of Copyright, Library of Congress, number 4932. Kaycee Benton kindly drew my attention to this document. See also the decorative “flower women” of Czech painter František Dvorˇák: The Lady of the Roses (1901) and Four Roses (1903) visually conflate female figures with the roses they smell. 21. Curran, “Picture Notes,” 56. 22. Thomas Moore, “Paradise and the Peri,” Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817), 133–60. 23. Curran, “Picture Notes,” 56. 24. See “American Art at the Lotos,” New York Times, December 17, 1898, 9. 25. Curran, “Picture Notes,” 56. 26. Ibid., 54. 27. Ibid., 56.

28. See the poster at https://‌www‌.fragrantica .‌ com‌/perfume‌/Coty‌/La‌-Rose‌-Jacqueminot ‌-7525‌.html. Jacqueminot Rose was also released by the London perfumery Baldwin & Co in 1887, but the Eastman Royal Perfumes version seems likely, since this was owned by a New York–based company, Jergens, from 1901. 29. “A City of Perfumes—the Tunisian,” New York Times, October 16, 1881, 4. 30. Stott, “Floral Femininity,” 76. 31. William Truettner, “William T. Evans: Collector of American Paintings,” American Art 3, no. 2 (1971): 50–79. 32. The Dew is unlocated. In Curran’s record ledger, held in a private collection, he wrote: “1902—The Dew, 20 × 30 inches—Exhibited at Paris Exposition 1902—Sold to Monsieur Leygues Ministry of Fine Arts—Paris.” See also Diane P. Fischer, Paris 1900: The American School at the Universal Exhibition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 175. 33. “American Art at Paris,” New York Times, February 28, 1900, 6; “The Evans Picture Sale,” New York Times, February 3, 1900, 6; and “Lotus Club,” New York Times, April 1, 1906, 7. Mary Cassatt deemed it a great distinction to have her work included in Evans’s gift; Truettner, “William T. Evans,” 57. 34. Amy King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom (Boston: Roberts, 1876). 35. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Richard Hare (New York: Rinehart Editions, 1960), http://‌www‌.ibiblio‌.org‌/eldritch‌/ist‌/fas‌ .htm. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Peter Trippi, J. W. Waterhouse (London: Phaidon, 2002), 195–96. 39. Gale Peter Largey and David Rodney Watson, “The Sociology of Odors,” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972): 1021–33, 1024. 40. Susan C. Shapiro, “The Mannish New Woman: Punch and Its Precursors,” Review of English Studies 42, no. 168 (1991): 510–22. 41. On the painting, see A. L. Baldry, “Some Recent Works by Mr J. W. Waterhouse, R.A.,” Studio, July 1911, 180, and Peter Trippi’s catalogue entry for lot 100 in “Victorian and Traditionalist Pictures,” Christie’s Sale Catalogue, June 7, 2007. 42. “Illustrations of the Senses: Smell,” Penny Illustrated Paper, May 23, 1868, 13.

Notes to Pages 185–196 43. Marie Corelli, The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1911), 125. 44. Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1960). The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1908 under the title The Soul of the Rose. It is not clear when the title My Sweet Rose was first applied. 45. Tennyson, Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, n.p. 46. Debra N. Mancoff, Flora Symbolica: Flowers in Pre-Raphaelite Art (London: Prestel, 2003), 50. 47. “Flower Odors,” 469. 48. Corelli, Life Everlasting, 125. 49. Jaeger, Dr. Jaeger’s Essays on HealthCulture, 268. For more on Jaeger and smell, see Jütte, History of the Senses, 231. 50. Charles Féré, Sensation et mouvement: Études expérimentales de psycho-mécanique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1887), 370. 51. Benjamin Ward Richardson, “Physical Action of Odours,” Asclepiad 8 (1891): 232–35, 234. 52. T. E. Shields, “The Effect of Odours, Irritant Vapors, and Mental Work upon the Blood Flow,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 1 (1896): 37–40, 38. In contrast, unpleasant odors led to a diminution of the blood supply to the heart and brain. These ideas surfaced in popular journalism, such as “The Physical Action of Scents: Some Are Bracing as a Frosty Morning, Others Are Enervating,” New York Times, July 17, 1894, 18. 53. Anne Harrington and Vernon Rosario, “Olfaction and the Primitive: Nineteenth-Century Thinking on Olfaction,” in The Science of Olfaction, ed. Michael Serby and Karen Chobor, 3–27 (New York: Springer Verlag, 1992), 21. 54. Ephraim Cutter, “The Action of Odors, Pleasant and Unpleasant, upon Blood Flow,” Journal of the American Medical Association 30 (1898): 366. 55. See “The Armpit” in Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, 126–29; Bloch, Sexual Life, 623. 56. Ellis, “Sexual Selection in Man,” 102. On the relationship between smell and female arousal, see Frédéric Justin Collet, L’odorat et ses troubles (Paris, n.p., 1904), 51. 57. Bloch, Sexual Life, 626. For Mantegazza, scent was a drug like coca leaves, the effects of which he enthusiastically researched. 58. Bloch cites Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore (Milan: Bernardoni, 1873), 176. See also Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 81.

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59. “Woman in Her Psychological Relations,” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 4 (January 1851): 27. 60. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995), 388. 61. Ibid., 389. Janice Carlisle has argued that in high-Victorian fiction, women whose floral odor is detected by men are marriageable. In contrast, women such as Maggie Tulliver, who are acutely sensitive to the odor of flowers, prove ineligible. Carlisle, Common Scents, 87. 62. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 389. 63. On smell and the sensory hierarchy, see Connor, “Intersensoriality,” http://‌stevencon nor‌.com‌/intersensoriality‌.html. 64. Carlisle, Common Scents, 86. 65. “Perfumes: Their Use and Abuse,” New York Times, October 1, 1871, 3. 66. A. L. Benedict, “The Education of the Sense of Smell,” Medical World 2, no. 99 (1898): 738–42. 67. Harry Thurston Peck, “The Morality of Perfumes,” Cosmopolitan 25 (1898): 585–89, 585. 68. Ibid., 586. 69. Ibid., 587. 70. “A Matter of Smell,” Kansas City Journal, September 18, 1898, 4. 71. With the exception of Lundborg’s Goya Lily, it is not clear which brands Peck alludes to. For example, Chypre was released, among other brands, by both Richard Hudnut and Brocard in 1895 and by Eastman Royal in 1898. 72. “The Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 3524 (May 11, 1895): 615. 73. Ibid. 74. On scent and soul, see Classen, Color of Angels, 36–60. 75. Macmillan, Ministry of Nature, 26. 76. Lynne Hume, Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities through the Senses (Berg: Oxford, 2007). 77. See the catalogue entry by John Christian for lot 166 in “Fine Victorian Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours,” Christie’s Sale Catalogue, June 3, 1994, 142. See also lot 206 in “European Art Part 1,” New York, Christie’s, October 28, 2019, https://‌www ‌.christies‌.com‌/lotfinder‌/Lot‌/john‌-william‌ -waterhouse‌-ra‌-british‌-1849‌-1917‌-the‌-62 29345‌-details‌.aspx; and Stephen Wildman, John Christian, Alan Crawford, and Laurence des Cars, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian ArtistDreamer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 187. 78. Macmillan, Ministry of Nature, 26.

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Notes to Pages 196–205

79. Rose E. Sketchley, “The Art of John William Waterhouse,” Art Journal, special no. (Christmas 1909), 25.

Chapter 8 1. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 2. Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 4. These associations relate to the stock figure of the Macaroni, the highly perfumed eighteenthcentury English gentlemen described in William Tullett, “The Macaroni’s “Ambrosial Essences”: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 163–80. 3. On the painting, see Rosemary Barrow, “The Scent of Roses: Alma-Tadema and the Other Side of Rome,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42 (1998): 183–202, and Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, eds., Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity (London: Prestel, 2016), 55–57. 4. “Current Art: The Royal Academy,” Magazine of Art 11 (1888): 268. 5. “The Royal Academy,” The Morning Post, May 5, 1888, 5. 6. Frederic Farrar, “Historic and Genre Pictures,” Good Words 32 (1888): 542–43. 7. William C. Ward, “Fine Arts: The Royal Academy,” The Independent, June 21, 1888, 7. 8. “London Picture Galleries,” Newcastle Courant, May 11, 1888, 6. 9. Véronique Gerard-Powell and Daniel Robbins, A Victorian Obsession: The Perez Simon Collection at Leighton House Museum (London: Leighton House Museum, 2014), 55. 10. “Rose Pictures,” Evening Telegraph, July 18, 1901, 6. 11. Penelope, “An At Home,” Western Times, February 6, 1888, 4. 12. “The Royal Academy,” Bristol Mercury, May 5, 1888, 8, and “The Royal Academy of the Arts,” Aberdeen Journal, May 7, 1888, 5. The Victorians referred to rose petals as rose leaves. 13. Barrow, “Scent of Roses,” 183. 14. This painting has parallels with the description in Émile Zola’s The Sin of Father Mouret (published in English just two years earlier), in which Albine lies under a rose bush

and is “submerged” beneath the petals that Serge shakes over her. 15. Penelope, “Our Ladies’ Column,” Western Times, April 24, 1888, 6. For Aird’s banquet, see also “Our Weekly Letter,” Western Times, April 7, 1888, 2, and Belfast News-Letter, May 7, 1888, 5. 16. Jane Desmarais, “Perfume Clouds: Olfaction, Memory, and Desire in Arthur Symons’s London Nights (1895),” in Economies of Desire at the Victorian “Fin de Siècle,” ed. Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, and Patricia Pulham, 62–79 (London: Routledge, 2015), 62. 17. Huysmans, Against Nature, 206. In Against Nature, Des Esseintes’s experiments with perfume are described in long chains of synesthetic association that echo the cadence of Albine’s death scene with its piling up of clauses. 18. Penelope, “An At Home,” Western Times, February 6, 1888, 4. 19. Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 4. 20. Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, 115. 21. Jane Desmarais and Alice Conde, eds., Decadence and the Senses (London: Legenda, MHRA, 2017). On lilies and orchids as the trademark flowers of decadence, see Desmarais, “Perfume Clouds,” 62. 22. Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray, 7. 23. Hermann Sudermann, Streaks of Light, trans. Grace Frank (London: Duckworth, 1912), 16. 24. “Winter Exhibition at Burlington House,” The Academy, March 8, 1913, 31. 25. Rosemary Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (London: Phaidon, 2001), 196. 26. Ostrom, Perfume, 32. 27. Rimmel, Book of Perfumes, 26. 28. Ibid., 74. 29. Ibid., 101. 30. Ibid., 67. 31. Giuliana Pieri, “D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema: Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism,” Modern Language Review 96, no. 2 (2001): 361–69. In 1883, D’Annunzio noted the recurring motif of roses in paintings by Alma-Tadema on display at the Espozione Nazionale in Rome. 32. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 197. 33. “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Art Journal 46 (1884): 178. 34. Emile Zola, The Sin of Father Mouret (1895; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 288.

Notes to Pages 205–220 35. Ibid., 288 and 286. 36. Ibid., 289–90. On tuberoses in Decadent literature, see Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 182–201. 37. Red, white, and pink roses often stood for love, bashful shame, and girlhood in the Victorian language of flowers. We might read them as symbolizing Albine’s love for Serge, her loss of virginity, and her girlish innocence. Laura Valentine, Language and Sentiment of Flowers (London: Frederick Warne, ca. 1860), 78. 38. These flowers are indicated in Royal Academy Pictures: The Royal Academy Supplement of the Magazine of Art (London: Cassell, 1895), vi. 39. Ibid. 40. York Herald, July 18, 1898, 3; “The York Summer Exhibition,” Yorkshire Gazette, July 22, 1899, 8. 41. “The Artistic East Lynne,” London Daily News, December 13, 1898, 6. 42. “The Royal Academy, Second Notice,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, May 14, 1895, 5. 43. Henry Blackburn, ed., Academy Notes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895), 19, and “The Royal Academy,” London Standard, May 16, 1895, 2. 44. “The Royal Academy,” London Standard, May 16, 1895, 2. 45. Huysmans, Against Nature, 96. 46. That summer, a translation of Nordau’s attack on the Decadent movement, Degeneration, reached the English book market. 47. Dominic Janes, “The Catholic Florist: Flowers and Deviance in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Church of England,” Visual Culture in Britain 11 (March 2001): 77–96, 79. 48. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 58. 49. Étienne Tardif, Des odeurs et des parfums, leur influence sur le sens génésique (Paris: Baillère, 1899), 59–60. 50. Emile Zola, L’assommoir (1877; Auckland: The Floating Press, 2010), 214; Emile Zola, Nana (1880; Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2007), 283. 51. Bernice Chitnis, Reflecting on Nana (London: Routledge, 2016). 52. Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris (1873; London: Random House, 2009), 234. 53. Penelope, “An At Home,” Western Times, February 6, 1888, 4. 54. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 58. 55. L’illustrazione Italiana 47, no. 25 (November 1877).

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56. Penelope, “An At Home,” Western Times, February 6, 1888, 4. 57. “La venganza de las flores,” Illustración Española y Americana 29, no. 19 (May 1885): 308. 58. L’événement illustré, March 20, 1866, cited in L. W. Tancock, “Some Early Critical Works of Emile Zola,” Modern Language Review 42, no. 1 (1947): 43–57, 50. 59. Zola, Sin of Father Mouret, 166. 60. Zola, Nana, 109. 61. “Suffocated by Natural Flowers,” Shields Daily Gazette, February 4, 1881, 4. 62. “Antipathy to Flowers,” Bury and Norwich Post, September 18, 1900, 2. 63. “Injurious Flowers,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, January 29, 1909, 14. 64. Donald McDonald, Scented Flowers and Fragrant Leaves (New York: Scribner, 1895), 50. 65. Birmingham Post, May 25, 1897, cited in Toll, Herbert Draper, 81. 66. Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 195. 67. Elaine Showalter, Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1985), 90–92. 68. Zola, Sin of Father Mouret, 108. 69. Aftel, Essence and Alchemy, 111. 70. Roja Dove, The Essence of Perfume (London: Black Dog, 2010), 58. 71. Elena Vosnaki, “Tuberose: The Harlot of Perfumery,” https://‌www‌.fragrantica‌.com‌/news ‌/Tuberose‌-the‌-Harlot‌-of‌-Perfumery‌-3306 ‌.html. 72. On smell and liminality, see Hume, Portals, 110–12. 73. Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 2001), 181. 74. Jodi Hauptman, Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 59. 75. “Flower Odors,” 471. 76. “The Royal Academy,” London Standard, May 16, 1895, 2; “The Royal Academy, Second Notice,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, May 14, 1895, 5. 77. “The Royal Academy,” Pall Mall Gazette, May 16, 1895, 3. 78. Zola, Sin of Father Mouret, 280. 79. John Singer Sargent, letter to Vernon Lee, cited in Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormand, John Singer Sargent (London: Princeton University Press, 1998), 61. 80. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 220–228

81. Ph. Burty, “Le salon de 1880: Les étrangers,” L’Art 6, no. 21 (1880): 299. My translation. 82. Henry James, “John S. Sargent,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 15 (1887): 688. 83. Known as “floating gold,” ambergris retailed at fifteen American dollars an ounce in 1880 and thirty dollars by 1903. 84. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Ambergris: The Search for Its Origin,” Isis 73, no. 3 (1982): 382–97. 85. “Ambergris (from Longman’s Magazine),” New York Times, March 8, 1885, 9; Grant Allen, “Ambergris,” Scientific American Supplement 1090 (1896): 1427–28. 86. “Ambergris, the Whale Fisher’s Prize,” New York Times, December 6, 1895, 16. 87. Piesse, Art of Perfumery, 151. 88. Perfumers mixed three ounces of the raw material with one gallon of pure alcohol to create a pure tincture, which would then be diluted with further alcohols before use in perfume. Classen, “Odor of the Other,” 147; “Ambergris, the Whale Fisher’s Prize,” New York Times, December 6, 1895, 16. 89. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Putnam, 1892), 386. 90. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 84. 91. Jenner, “Civilization and Deodorization?,” 129. 92. Martha Louise Rayne, Gems of Deportment (Detroit: Tyler, 1882), 282. 93. James, “John S. Sargent,” 688; J. J. R., “Our Monthly Gossip: The Paris Salon of 1880,” Lippincott’s Magazine 26, no. 153 (1880): 384. 94. A. Genevay, “Salon de 1880,” Le musée artistique et littéraire 4 (1880): 14. My translation. 95. Hannah Betts, “Whale Vomit, Faeces and Urine . . . What’s Really in Your Perfume?” The Telegraph, April 17, 2016. 96. Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams and Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 173, and William H. Gerdts, Down Garden Paths: The Floral Environment in American Art (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 79. 97. Gerdts, Down Garden Paths, 79. 98. “General News,” Adelaide Advertiser, October 24, 1893, 5.

99. “The Priestess of Delphi,” Adelaide Advertiser, October 27, 1893, 6. 100. “The British Art Gallery,” The Argus (Melbourne), March 10, 1893, 7. 101. “The British Art Gallery,” South Australian Register (Adelaide), August 30, 1893, 6. 102. “The Priestess of Delphi,” Adelaide Advertiser, October 27, 1893, 6. 103. Deborah Jowett, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 147. See also Jane Sherman, The Drama of Denishawn Dance (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). In 1911, inspired by St. Denis’s performance, Roshanara also performed an Incense Dance in London. 104. Shawn, Ruth St. Denis; Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (New York: Doubleday, 1981); Caroline Coffin and Charles H. Coffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1912); and Walter Terry, The Dance in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 53. 105. Henry Tyrell, “Yes, Society Did Gasp When Radha in Incense-Laden Air Threw Off the Bondage of the Earthly Senses,” The World, March 25, 1906, X2. 106. Krueger, “Decadent Perfume.” 107. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Novels of A. C. Swinburne: Love’s Cross-Currents (London: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), 342. 108. Stamelman, “Eros—and Thanatos—of Scent,” 269. 109. “Perfumed Ladies (from the London St James’s Gazette),” New York Times, August 18, 1890, 4. 110. “Injections of Perfumes (from the London Chronicle),” New York Times, August 21, 1898, 10. 111. “Perfumed Ladies (from the London St James’s Gazette),” New York Times, January 3, 1891, 4; “The Perfumed Maniacs (from the London St James’s Gazette),” New York Times, April 6, 1892, 11; “Perfumed Ladies (from the London St James’s Gazette),” New York Times, January 3, 1891, 4; “Injecting Perfume into the Blood,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1891, 16; “Injections of Perfume,” Washington Post, August 28, 1898, 21; “Perfume Now Injected: Latest Fad in Paris—Skin Becomes Saturated with Aroma,” New York Times, October 1, 1912, 5; and “Perfume Whim Is Yankee Fad: My Lady Uses Hypodermic Needle to Scent Herself,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1912, 2.

Notes to Pages 228–237 112. On this subject, see Krueger, “Decadent Perfume.” 113. “Perfumery,” New York Times, December 17, 1894, 5. 114. Edith Cooper, “Works and Days,” diary entry of May 9, 1888 (ADD MS 46777, fol. 5r), cited in Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility, 232. 115. Ibid., 201. 116. Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875 (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 114.

Conclusion 1. Nead, Haunted Gallery. 2. Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses,” 310. 3. Curran, “Class in Oil Painting,” 100, and Carrà, “Painting of Sounds,” 151. 4. “The Wonders of a London Water Drop,” Punch 18 (1850): 188–89. The cartoon was

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inspired by Arthur Hill Hassall, A Microscope Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London and the Suburban Districts (London: Samuel Highley, 1850). See Halliday, The Great Stink of London, 32–40. 5. Felix Marcilhac, René Lalique, 1860– 1945: Maître-verrier: Analyse de l’Oeuvre et Catalogue Raisonné (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2004), 327. See cat. no. 488. 6. Mark W. D. Paterson, “Digital Scratch and Virtual Sniff: Simulating Scents,” in Drobnick, Smell Culture Reader, 359. 7. Charlie Chaplin, Hull Daily Mail, February 14, 1931, 5. 8. Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 8. 9. Rudyard Kipling, The Five Nations (London: Methuen, 1903), 5.

Index

Abbey, Edwin Austin, 119, 127 Ads (Warhol), 236 advertisements Art Nouveau, 88–90, 91, 228, 229 Orientalism, 88–89 Papier d’Arménie poster (Beaussart), 67–69, 87, 131, 147, 248n75 perfume, 61, 66, 138–40, 228, 229, 231–32 sanitary imagery, 61, 66–67 Aestheticism Autumn Leaves (Millais), 117–23, 126, 128, 136, 155 Beata Beatrix (Rossetti), 119, 131–33 caricatures of, 1–2 and Christianity, 158 Deacon, The (Solomon), 158 Haweis, Mary Eliza, 105–6 Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome (Solomon), 164–65, 201, 257n78 hyperesthesia, 103, 233 and industrial modernity, 233–34 influence of Victorian science writers, 40 Lady Lilith (Rossetti), 48, 69–70 Medea (Sandys), 69 Morgan le Fay (Sandys), 69 Mystery of Faith, The (Solomon), 158, 161 olfactory imagery, 113 Pandora (Rossetti), 65, 66, 87 Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”) (Watts), 20–28, 96, 170, 189, 219, 242n4, 258n13 Pot Pourri (Draper), 127–29, 214–15 Pot Pourri (Leslie), 126–27 Proserpine (Rossetti), 119, 120, 122 Saint of the Eastern Church, A (Solomon), 161–64, 225 scent symbolism, 1–2, 7 sensory experiences, 119 Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Whistler), 44 Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost (Solomon), 158–61, 164–65, 169 Venus Verticordia (Rossetti), 70–71, 169 aesthetics. See olfactory aesthetics Aftel, Mandy, 214–15 Against Nature (Huysmans), 32, 39, 42, 72, 145, 201, 208, 216, 260n17 Albine (Hartmann), 211

Alcott, Louisa May, 182 Alighieri, Dante, 131–32 Allen, Grant, 9, 40–42, 99, 104 Allingham, William, 72, 121 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence in America, 240n28 and Collier, John, 205 critics, 13 olfactory images, 3, 239n6 In a Rose Garden, 200, 223, 260n14 The Roses of Heliogabalus, 81, 113, 197–202, 204, 211, 228–29, 232–33 and St. Denis, Ruth, 31 women smelling flowers, 200 Althaus, Julius, 28 Amato, Joseph, 78 ambergris cultural associations, 219–22 Fumée d’ambre gris (Sargent), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 perfume use, 32, 40, 190, 220–21, 262n88 scent classification systems, 36 as stench protection, 52 value, 220, 262n83 American Impressionism Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris) (Sargent), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 See also Curran, Charles Courtney Anderson, Olive, 214 Anstruther-Thomson, Kit, 136 antiquity, 202–5 anti-Catholic tension, 160 Apotheosis of War, The (Vereshchagin), 251n59 Arnolfini Portrait (Eyck), 59 aroma theory (spiritus rector), 148 art history, 10–11, 13–15 Artigue, Albert-Émile, 208–9, 225 art journals, 10, 240n29 Art Nouveau, 88–90, 91, 228, 229 “Art of Noises, The” (Russolo), 93 Attar of Roses (Mowbray), 222 At the Garden Shrine (Godward), 218, 219 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The (Holmes), 125–26 Autumn Leaves (Millais), 117–23, 126, 128, 136, 155 Azaleas (Moore), 128

Index Babinet, Jacques, 35, 38 Bacon, Francis, 156 Bain, Alexander, 40, 98–100, 109, 113, 122, 230 Bank and the Royal Exchange, The (Logsdail), 234 Barlow, Paul, 128, 151–52 Barnes, David S., 73 Barringer, Tim, 157 Barton, Emma, 193, 194 Baudelaire, Charles, 29–30, 32–33, 105, 117 Bauman, Zygmunt, 43 Beata Beatrix (Rossetti), 119, 131–33 Beaussart, Léona Marcelle, 67–69, 87, 131, 147, 248n75 Beauvais, Anaïs, 210, 211 Beerbohm, Max, 1, 2, 20, 103 Bell, Alexander Graham, 172 Belle haleine, eau de voilette (Duchamp), 236 “bells and smells” controversy, 123, 161–62, 165, 168, 208 Bell Scott, William, 7, 9 Belly of Paris, The (Zola), 211 Berger, John, 13 Besant, Annie, 95 Binet, Alfred, 101 Blind Girl, The (Millais), 59, 148–57, 165, 169, 174, 183, 256n41 “Blind Girl, The” (Snow), 153–56 blindness, 19, 148–54, 167, 172-174 Bloch, Iwan, 187–88 body odor and social class, 189–90 Bonnard, Pierre, 76, 77–78, 80 Bonnier, Gaston, 79 Book of Perfumes, The (Rimmel), 39, 139, 204 Boreas and the Fallen Leaves (De Morgan), 250n29 Botticelli, Sandro, 81 Boudoir Rose, The (Schafer), 102 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 175 Bradley, Katherine, 229, 232 Brant, Clare, 74 Bridal Rose, The (Eickemeyer), 173–74 Bridgman, Laura, 151, 153, 233 Brinkley, Francis, 43 Broca, Paul, 41–43, 143–44 Brouardel, Paul, 65 Brown, Ron, 215 Browne, William, 156 Brueghel, Jan the Elder, 83 Bullen, St. John, 109–10 Bullock, Llewellyn, 35–36, 38 Burbridge, Frederick, 19, 66, 79, 147 Burne-Jones, Edward, 1, 3 in Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1–2, 103

265

in France, 240n28 Legend of the Briar Rose series, 206, 211 Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose, 194–95 Woman up a Ladder Smelling a Blossom, 82 butterflies, 71, 150, 168–69, 183 Cadence of Autumn, The (De Morgan), 88 Caracalla (Alma-Tadema), 200 Carlisle, Janice, 113, 189, 259n61 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Sargent), 119–20, 121 Carrà, Carlo, 90, 92, 232 Carrière, Eugène, 73 Chadwick, Edwin, 51–54, 59, 65–66 Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé), 33–36, 38 Chambers, Robert, 35 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 172 Chaucer, 193–94 Cherie (Goncourt), 227 Chocolat idéal (Mucha), 90, 91 cholera, 50, 54–55, 65, 67, 69, 78, 240n17 Christian, John, 193 Christianity blindness tropes, 150–54 flower symbolism, 25 incense, 158, 160, 165 myrtle, 162, 257n73 rainbows, 156–57, 168 ritualism controversies, 123, 158, 160–62, 165, 168, 208 scents, 146–47, 157, 168 See also Fortescue-Brickdale, Eleanor; Millais, John Everett; Solomon, Simeon Christ in the House of His Parents (Millais), 157 Chrysanthemums (Curran), 170 cinema, 235–36 cities artificial scents, 228 deodorization, 64 nervous exhaustion, 101–3 olfactory hallucination, 109 sanitation improvements, 59–60, 62–63, 65 smog, 62, 72–73 smoke, 49, 56, 60, 62–63, 248n59 stench, 49–54, 57, 59, 62–65, 67, 73, 247n25 See also London; miasma città morta, La (D’Annunzio), 204 City Atlas, The (Starr), 234–35 class, 5, 7, 189–92, 201 Classen, Constance aesthetic interest in smell, 8 artistic engagement with senses, 3 femininity and scent associations, 174 global circulation of senses, 9

266

Index

Classen, Constance (continued) non-visual senses in art, 14 olfactory silence of the twentieth century, 11 on Salome Dancing Before Herod, 71 scent and seduction associations, 69 scent signifying mystery, 32 sensory cultural analysis, 14 sensory experience and national identity, 138 on Toorop, Jan, 88 Western privileging of sight, 13 cleaning of Renaissance paintings, 59, 247n49 Cleere, Eileen, 59 Cloquet, Hippolyte, 148 closed-eye reverie images, 20, 126, 132, 148, 170, 174, 180, 185, 195 Coates, Florence Earle, 154, 172–73 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 156 Collier, John and Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 205 The Daughters of Colonel Makins MP, 205 The Death of Albine, 205–8, 212, 214–15, 217–18, 228, 260n37 floral asphyxiation paintings, 205 The Priestess of Delphi, 225, 226 Colvin, Sidney, 40–41 Comerre, Léon François, 210, 211 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 53, 151, 231, 233 Connor, Steven, 19–20, 46, 77 Conroy, Carolyn, 162 Cooper, Edith, 229, 232 coral, 57, 247n43 Corbett, David Peters, 8 Corbin, Alain, 14, 48, 68, 248n59 Corelli, Marie, 185–86 corpuscular theory, 77–78, 90, 95, 216 Couture, Thomas, 204 Craig, Maurice, 110 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 29, 33, 35, 38, 47, 64–65 Craven, James, 222 Cruise, Colin, 158 Curran, Charles Courtney, 8 Chrysanthemums, 170 The Dew, 181, 258n32 fairy paintings, 176–82 flower paintings, 97–98, 107, 176–79, 232 painting scent, 97–98 The Perfume of Roses, 177–79, 181 The Peris, 177, 181, 222 The Scent of the Rose, 44, 180–82 sexualization of women, 180–81 Cutter, Ephraim, 187, 209 Daly, Nicholas, 48 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 204–5, 260n31

Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden (Beerbohm), 1, 2, 20, 103 Darwin, Charles, 5, 11, 30, 101, 239n12 Daughters of Colonel Makins MP, The (Collier), 205 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 79 Dawson, William James, 103–4 Day, Fred Holland, 7, 8 Deacon, The (Solomon), 158 Death of Albine, The (Collier), 205–8, 212, 214–15, 217–18, 228, 260n37 Death of Sardanapalus, The (Delacroix), 207 de Biran, Maine, 117, 119 Debussy, Claude, 30–31 Decadence Against Nature (Huysmans), 32, 39, 42, 72, 145, 201, 208, 216, 260n17 Parisian Sketches, 144 Portrait of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 32 Decadent Movement, 1, 140, 202, 204, 206 decay and scent, 214–15 Degas, Edgar, 240n18 Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène, 207, 229–30 De Morgan, Evelyn, 81, 88, 250n29 Dent, Thomas, 130 Deverell, Walter Howell, 151, 155 Dew, The (Curran), 181, 258n32 Diaghilev, Serge, 31 di Bello, Patrizia, 15 Dickens, Charles, 30, 49, 50, 101–2, 151, 153, 233 Dijkstra, Bram, 211 Dillon, Edward, 36–38, 42–43 dirt, 29, 50, 57, 59, 65–66, 72, disease associations with scents, 48, 52 See also miasma; stench Divisionism, 90, 92, 93–96 Incense (Takách), 94, 95, 225, 234, 250n46 Profumo (Russolo), 61, 92, 93, 95 Dracula (Stoker), 67, 69 Draper, Herbert, 127–29, 214–15 “Dream of Fair Women, A” (Tennyson), 124 dreams, scent-inspired, 140–43 Drobnick, Jim, 10, 15 drowning, 56, 206, 214–16, 217 drowning in scent, 198, 215–16 Duchamp, Marcel, 236–37 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 136 Edison, Thomas, 79 Eickemeyer, Rudolph, 173–74 Eleonora Tommasi (Lega), 134, 135 Eliot, George, 105, 189, 254n60 Elmore, Alfred, 23

Index Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo, The (Stillman), 193 Enchantress, The (Wardle), 249n91 L’Enfant du Regiment (Millais), 168 Ernst, Rudolf, 222–23, 224 erotics of scent, 170–96, 208–9 European Symbolism, 7–9, 48, 87–88 Cadence of Autumn, The (De Morgan), 88 città morta, La (D’Annunzio), 204 Eve Tempted (Watts), 83, 84 Fragrance, The (Yakunchikova), 175, 233–34 Fragrant Air, The (Frédéric), 6, 7, 170, 222 Heart of the Rose, The (Macdonald), 195 Hope (Watts), 24 Hypnos (Day), 7, 8 Incense (Khnopff), 225 Legend of the Briar Rose (Burne-Jones), 206, 211 Night and Sleep (De Morgan), 81 Ophelia Among the Flowers (Redon), 215–16, 217 Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose (Burne-Jones), 194–95 pisanelle ou la mort parfumée, La (D’Annunzio), 204–5 Revenge of the Flowers, The (Wertheimer), 211–12, 214 Salome Dancing Before Herod (Moreau), 48, 71–72, 147, 225 Three Perfumes, The (Macdonald), 44, 61, 84–87, 175, 193 Victim of Flowers (Munkácsy), 212 Women in a Garden (Toorop), 87–88 Evans, William T., 181, 258n33 Eve of the Deluge, The (Millais), 151–52 Eve Tempted (Watts), 83, 84 evolutionary theory, 5, 41–43 Eyck, Jan van, 59 Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity, The (Redon), 216 fairies, 87 Curran’s paintings, 176–82 The Lover’s World (Fortescue-Brickdale), 167 perfume bottles, 79–80, 84, 86, 87, 233, 235 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 249n21 “Faraday Giving His Card to Father Thames” (Leech), 81–82 Far Away Thoughts (Godward), 128 Farr, William, 67 Farrar, Frederic, 199 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 182, 189 fecundity of scent, 197–230 female bloom metaphors, 182

267

Fénéon, Félix, 32, 38, 105 Féré, Charles Samson, 187 Festival of Roses, The (Mowbray), 222 filth. See stench, dirt Fine Scent, A (Toulmouche), 44 Fink, Henry Theophilus, 42 Fisher, Jennifer, 10 Flask, The (Baudelaire), 117 Flint, Kate, 121, 131, 148 floral death asphyxiation, 198, 205–14 The Death of Albine (Collier), 205–8, 212, 214–15, 217–18, 228, 260n37 decay, 214–15 drowning, 214–16 hardening, 216–19 perfume, 212–14 The Roses of Heliogabalus (Alma-Tadema), 81, 113, 197–202, 204, 211, 228–29, 232–33 scentless flowers at funerals, 216–17 The Sin of Father Mouret (Zola), 205–8, 211, 213–14, 218, 260n14 Flower Market, Old Rome, A (Waterhouse), 191, 211, 228 “Flower Odors” (anonymous), 126, 154, 216–17 flowers church displays, 208 Curran’s advice for painting the perfume of, 97–98 gardens, 23–24 injurious potential, 212–13 Linnaeus’s system for gendering, 182 petals, 249n21 potpourri, 125–30 scentless, 216–17 scents and sexuality, 188–89, 259n61 as stench defense, 52 synesthetic descriptions, 28–29 tuberose, 215 See also flower symbolism flower symbolism, 26 beauty, 24 camellias, 20, 22–28, 154 Choosing (Watts), 20, 22–25 Christian, 25 corrosion of memory, 128–29 femininity, 44, 182 fidelity, 119 innocent passion, 214–15 jasmine, 214–15 moral, 23–25 The Perfect Scent (Schramm), 44 petals and reverie, 128 poppies, 81, 132–33, 206, 212

268

Index

flower symbolism (continued) primroses, 125 Renaissance, 81 roses color differences, 261n37 debauchery, 199 female genitalia, 182, 185 hedonism, 201–2 Renaissance, 81 sexual attraction, 83, 183 Virgin Mary, 193 womanhood, 44, 194–95 sexual, 83, 181–83 The Sisters (Pinwell), 125 tuberose, 215 violets, 20, 22–25, 119, 125, 258n13 Floyd, Phyllis, 26 Fort, Paul, 31 Fortescue-Brickdale, Eleanor The Lover’s World, 165–69, 174–75, 193, 257nn81–82 natural magic symbolism, 168 Only the Actions of the Just Smell Sweet, 168 religion, 168 In springtime, the only pretty ring time— From As You Like It, 82 Youth and the Lady, 250n29 Found (Rossetti), 55–57, 59, 247n36, 247nn40–41 Found Drowned (Watts), 56 Fragrance, The (Yakunchikova), 175, 233–34 fragrance trails, 87–90, 197–98, 250n29 Fragrant Air, The (Frédéric), 6, 7, 170, 222 Frédéric, Léon Henri Marie, 6, 7, 170, 222 Freire, Luciano, 61–62 French Academic painting Death of Sardanapalus, The (Delacroix), 207 Romans of the Decadence, The (Couture), 204 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 187 Fry, Roger, 13 Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris) (Sargent), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 Futurism, 90 “Art of Noises, The” (Russolo), 93 “Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, The” (Carrà), 90, 92 Gagnier, Regenia, 27 Galton, Francis, 102, 105–6, 108, 251n52 Gardien, V., 140–41 Gauguin, Paul, 30 Gentle Spring (Sandys), 169, 183

germ theory, 65–66, 73, 213, 233 ghosts, 123, 125, 133–34, 136, 145 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 110–12, 252n82, 252n84, 252n87 Giménez y Martin, Juan, 7 Gissing, George, 73, 111 Glasgow Four, 84, 87, 249n25 See also Macdonald, Margaret Godward, John William, 3, 61, 128, 202–4, 218, 219 Goncourt, Edmond de, 30, 227 Goodall, Edwin, 110 Gosse, Philip Henry, 78 Gould, Veronica Franklin, 243n27 Grace Rose (Sandys), 128 Greenberg, Clement, 13 grief, 121, 131-133, 134–36 Grieve, Alastair, 247n40 Griffin, Gerald, 53 Grossmith, John Lipscomb, 147 Grubicy de Dragon, Vittore, 95 Guerlain perfume house, 39–40, 61, 87, 201 Gutmann, Bessie Pease, 170 Haeckel, Ernest, 239n12 Halleck, Reuben Post, 100–1, 109, 113 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 99–100 Harem, The (Picasso), 236 Harris, J., 142 Hartmann, Lucy, 211 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 31, 37–38, 235, 245n80 Haskins, Katherine, 10, 240n29 Havelock Ellis, Henry, 147, 167, 188 Haweis, Mary Eliza, 105–6, 108, 112, 191 Heart of the Rose, The (Macdonald), 195 hedonism, 200–202 “Helen Keller with a Rose” (Coates), 154, 172–73 Heliogabalus, 204 Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome (Solomon), 164–65, 201, 257n78 The Roses of Heliogabalus (Alma-Tadema), 81, 113, 197–202, 204, 211, 228–29, 232–33 The Roses of Heliogabalus (Reiffenstein), 204 Henry, William, 37 Heywood, Alice, 142 Heywood, Ian, 13, 15 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 257n82 High Anglican Church. See Christianity Holmes, Martha Stoddart, 152–53 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 125–26, 130 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 133–34

Index homoeroticism, 7, 197, 198, 201 See also Solomon, Simeon Hope (Watts), 24 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 153 Howes, David, 11, 13–14, 32, 90 Hunt, Holman, 122, 157 Huxley, Aldous, 36, 101 Huysmans, Joris-Karl criticisms of, 144 Against Nature, 32, 39, 42, 72, 145, 201, 208, 216, 260n17 Parisian Sketches, 144 poetry, 30 scent-induced arousal, 187 hyperesthesia. See sensory overload Hypnos (Day), 7, 8 hysteria, 28, 102, 105, 107, 109–10, 129, 214, 225 L’Illustration journal, 33–36 Images from the Future (Lasswitz), 37 In a Rose Garden (Alma-Tadema), 200, 223, 260n14 incense Christianity, 158–165, 168 and dance, 31, 225, 227 and dreams, 141 Japanese, 42–43 Judaism, 158 Papier d’Arménie poster (Beaussart), 67–69, 87, 131, 147, 248n75 and petrifaction, 219 Rossetti, Dante, 3, 239n4 and trances, 223, 225–27 Incense (Khnopff), 225 Incense (St. Denis), 31, 225, 227 Incense (Takách), 94, 95, 225, 234, 250n46 indole, 214 industrial sublime, 62 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 142–43 In springtime, the only pretty ring time—From As You Like It (Fortescue-Brickdale), 82 In the Studio (Draper), 128 Intoxication (Artigue), 225 intoxication by image, 228–30 intoxication by scent, 197, 223, 225–27 ionone, 87, 137 Irish immigration, 151, 160 Irish Vagrants, The (Deverell), 151 Iron and Coal (Bell Scott), 7, 9 Jackson, John Hughlings, 109–10, 133 Jacox, Francis, 124 Jaeger, Gustav, 147, 186–87 James, Henry, 73, 220

269

James, William, 136–37 Janes, Dominic, 161, 208 Japan, 42–43 Jay, Martin, 232 Jenner, Mark, 4, 221 Johns, Jasper, 236 Jones, Caroline, 13 Judaism, 158, 162 kakosmia. See olfactory hallucination Keller, Helen education, 153, 172 photograph of smelling a rose, 171, 172–74, 257n9 on smell and blindness, 19–20 and Transcendentalism, 172–73 Kernahan, James Coulson, 103–4, 113 Khnopff, Fernand, 7, 225 King, Amy M., 78, 182 King, Bryan, 160 Kingsley, Charles, 123, 157 Kingsley, Rose, 105, 191 Kipling, Rudyard, 237 Kock, Robert, 65 Koureas, Gabriel, 15 Krueger, Cheryl, 5, 15 Lady Lilith (Rossetti), 48, 69–70 Lake, Catharine, 25, 162 Lalique, René, 79–80, 84, 86, 87, 233, 235 Lallemand, Claude-François, 103 Lambourne, Lionel, 161 Lanser, Susan, 252n82 Laporte, Dominique, 221 Largey, Gale, 183 Lasswitz, Kurd, 37–38 Laube, Hans, 236 laudanum, 81, 131, 133 Lauwrens, Jenni, 15 Lavender Mist Scent (Pollock), 236 Leadbeater, Charles Webster, 137–38 Leakey, F. W., 32 Lee, Vernon, 136, 220, 254n56 Leech, John, 54, 55, 81–82 Lega, Silvestro, 134, 135 Legend of the Briar Rose (Burne-Jones), 206, 211 Leighton, Frederic, 3 Leonardo da Vinci, 90 Lesbia Brandon (Swinburne), 227 Leslie, George Dunlop, 126–27 Lewes, George Henry, 99, 102, 105, 150 Liégois, Théodore, 78 Life Everlasting, The (Corelli), 185–86 Lifted Veil, The (Eliot), 105, 254n60 Linnaeus, Carolus, 245n75

270

Index

Logsdail, William, 234 London Boards of Health formation, 51 miasma and stench, 49–51, 54, 57, 59, 63, 67, 73, 247n25 sanitation improvements, 59–60, 62–63, 65 “London Smells (Edgar Allan Poe ‘Up to Date’)” (Sambourne), 63 Lotto, Lorenzo, 81 Lover’s World, The (Fortescue-Brickdale), 165–69, 174–75, 193, 257nn81–82 Lucrezia Borgia (Rossetti), 105 Lundborg perfume house, 61, 65–66, 138, 139, 231, 232, 234, 259n71 Macchiaioli movement, 134, 135 Macdonald, Margaret anti-materialism, 86 The Heart of the Rose, 195 inspirations, 87 La mort parfumée, 205 The Three Perfumes, 44, 61, 84–87, 175, 193 Mackonochie, A. H., 161–62 Macmillan, Hugh, 146, 148, 168, 193, 196 Madonna of the Rosary (Lotto), 81 Magic Circle, The (Waterhouse), 69, 225 Magritte, René, 236 Maitland, Thomas, 103–4 the male sniff, 6–7 Manchester from Kersal Moor (Wyld), 62 Mancoff, Debra, 186 Mantegazza, Paolo, 188, 209, 259n57 Mary Magdalene (Sandys), 134 Maud (Tennyson), 170, 186 Maxwell, Catherine, 40, 201 Mayhew, Henry, 49, 152 McClintock, Anne, 60 McDonald, Donald, 213 Medea (Sandys), 69 memory, 117–45 See also scent memories; sensory recall Meredith, George, 131 Mesnard, Eugène, 79 miasma disease theory, 48, 50–51, 64–67, 69, 73, 213, 233 fear of, 54, 69 versus germ theory, 65 London, 49–51, 54, 57, 59, 63, 67, 73, 247n25 motivating visualization of scents, 233 represented as demons, 67, 87 in sanitation advertising, 67 thrill of, 67, 69 See also stench

Millais, John Everett Autumn Leaves, 117–23, 126, 128, 136, 155 The Blind Girl, 59, 148–57, 165, 169, 174, 183, 256n41 Christian imagery use, 151–54 Crimean war, 121-122 Christ in the House of His Parents, 157 The Eve of the Deluge, 151–52 in France, 240n28 L’Enfant du Regiment, 168 Murthly Moss, Perthshire, 113 News from Home, 121 Ophelia, 157, 206, 215 and the Oxford Movement, 157 Peace Concluded, 121 Pot Pourri, 119, 128 reading habits, 155–56 religion, 154–55, 157 The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 151 scent-infused paintings, 3, 239n3 Shelling Peas, 128 Spring, 119, 124 vanitas painting, 122 The Violet’s Message, 119 Wandering Thoughts, 122 Millais, John Guille, 148, 150, 155 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 189 Modernism, 236 Modernist art, 13 Molenaer, Jan, 81 Monet, Claude, 72–73 Monin, Ernest, 147 Monroe, Will Seymour, 141 Moore, Albert, 102–3, 113, 128 Moore, George, 241n41 morality cultural anxieties about stench, 53–54, 57 flower symbolism, 23–25 olfactory metaphors, 24–25 perfume, 47, 190–91, 228, 259n71 Mordan, Sampson, 11–12, 41 Moreau, Gustave, 48, 71–72, 147, 216, 225 Morgan le Fay (Sandys), 69 Morris, William, 1, 2, 23–24, 206 Morris & Co., 195–96 mort d’Albine, La (Comerre), 210, 211 mort d’Albine dans Le Paradou, La (Beauvais), 210, 211 mort parfumée, La (Macdonald), 205 Moses, William Stainton, 134 moving images, 234–36 Mowbray, Henry Siddons, 7, 222, 223 Mucha, Alphonse, 90, 91, 228, 229 Munkácsy, Mihály, 212 Murthly Moss, Perthshire (Millais), 113

Index musk natural, 104 olfactory hallucinations, 109 perfume, 40, 46, 69, 72, 104, 190–91 stench protection, 52 Musk (Moore), 102–3, 113 Myers, Frederic W. H., 134 Mysterium (Scriabin), 31 Mystery of Faith, The (Solomon), 158, 161 Nana (Zola), 211, 213 Narcissus (Thornycroft), 197, 198 nasal physiology (nosology), 239n12, 240n18 natural magic, 168, 257n88 Nead, Lynda, 231 Nero (Philips), 205 nervous disorders exhaustion, 101–3 hysteria, 28, 102, 105, 107, 109–10, 129, 214, 225 olfactory hallucination, 28, 105–13, 143 rest cure, 110, 252n77 See also sensory overload (hyperesthesia) neuralgia, 112 neurasthenia, 102–3, 105, 112 neurology and degeneration, 143–45 New Grub Street (Gissing), 73, 111 New Perfume, The (Godward), 61, 202–4 News from Home (Millais), 121 the New Woman, 183, 186 Night and Sleep (De Morgan), 81 Nittis, Giuseppe de, 61 Nochlin, Linda, 61 Nordau, Max, 43, 101–2, 143–45, 261n46 nostalgia, 117–19, 120, 122, 124, 126–27 “nouvel art: L’osphrétique, Un” (Cham), 33–36 Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne (Bonnard), 76, 77–78, 80 ocular deception themes, 26 odor of the rainbow, 156–57 odorphone, the, 36–37 odors air pollution, 72 as aphrodisiac, 188 as drug, 186, 227-230 and soul, 23-25, 45, 147, 167, 193-6, 216, 217, classification systems, 36–37, 245n75 corpuscular theory, 77–78, 90, 95, 216 disease fears, 48 food, 9 gendered associations, 5, 20, 106–7, 142, 174, 176, 239n13 heady, 72, 136, 183, 190–91, 201

271

impulse to see smell, 12, 78-80, 233 influences on the mind, 53, 130–31 influences on the body, 186-188 laudanum, 133 medicinal uses, 51–52 musky, 40, 46, 52, 69, 72, 104, 109, 190–91 petrichor, 156 physiological aesthetics, 104 representational challenges, 74 of spirits, 133–34 spiritual associations, 45 stimulating and tranquilizing effects, 186–87, 259n52 sulfur, 111, 252n84 synthetic violets, 87 therapeutic, 67 See also perfume; scent as artistic medium; scent memories; scent symbolism; stench O’Farrell, Mary Ann, 154 olfactif figures, 197, 201–2 olfactory aesthetics deodorized environments, 63–64 evolutionary discourses, 41–43 interest in, 8, 38 perfume, 33–41 physiology, 104 sanitation’s influence on, 59, 64 olfactory art historians, 15 olfactory etiquette, 38, 71, 140, 189, 190, 201, 221 olfactory hallucination, 28, 105–13, 143 olfactory images. See visual representations of scent olfactory imagination, 101, 108–9, 137, 142–43, 145, 183, 234 olfactory nerves, 109, 130-131 Only the Actions of the Just Smell Sweet (Fortescue-Brickdale), 168 On the Brink (Elmore), 23 “Opera Glass” (Mordan), 11–12 Ophelia (Millais), 157, 206, 215 Ophelia Among the Flowers (Redon), 215–16, 217 opium, 81, 131–33 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The (Meredith), 131 Orientalism, 6–7 advertising, 88–89 ambergris, 222 animality associations, 191 Attar of Roses (Mowbray), 222 Festival of Roses, The (Mowbray), 222 Fumée d’ambre gris (Sargent), 221–22 Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris) (Sargent), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 Mowbray, Henry Siddons, 222

272

Index

Orientalism (continued) perfume, 72, 139–40, 191, 204, 221–23, 254n68 Perfume Makers, The (Ernst), 222–23, 224 Rose Harvest, The (Mowbray), 7, 222, 223 trances, 225, 227 women, 221 Ostrom, Lizzie, 87, 204 “Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, The” (Carrà), 90, 92 Pandora (Rossetti), 65, 66, 87 Pandora-themed paintings, 65–67 Papier d’Arménie poster (Beaussart), 67–69, 87, 131, 147, 248n75 Papillon, Fernand, 37, 109, 254n68 paranormal, the ghosts, 123, 125, 133–34, 136, 145 olfactory hallucination, 28, 105–13, 143 research into, 106–7, 134, 137 telepathy, 137–38, 254n60 See also spiritualism Parfumerie Violet, Boulevard des Capucines (Nittis), 61 parfums de la nuit, Les (Debussy), 30–31 Parisian Sketches (Huysmans), 144 parosmia. See olfactory hallucination Parsifal (Wagner), 30 Pater, Walter, 33, 161 Paul-Baudry, Cécile, 240n16 Peace Concluded (Millais), 121 Peck, Harry Thurston, 47, 190–91, 259n71 Penelope (art critic), 200–1, 211 Perfect Scent, The (Schramm), 43–46, 170, 219 performing arts, 30–31, 37–38, 205, 225, 227, 235 perfume, 4–5, 73 advertisements, 61, 66, 138–40, 228, 229, 231–32 artificial perfume – see synthetic scents aestheticization of, 33–41 ambergris, 32, 40, 190, 220–21, 262n88 art of, 32 bottles, 79–80, 84, 86, 87, 233, 235 concerts, 34-38 classical, 202–5 emporiums, 202–4 and femme fatales, 69–72 foul and fragrant qualities, 69 industry growth, 60–61 injection rumors, 227–28 Jicky, 39–40 La Rose Jacqueminot, 179, 203, 258n28 morality, 47, 189–91, 228 musk, 40, 46, 69, 72, 104, 190–91 myrtle, 162

Orientalism, 72, 139–40, 191, 204, 221–23, 254n68 and the paranormal, 137–38 Pompeia, 203–4 proposals for “performances” of, 33–36 Queen Victoria’s, 190 social class, 190 stigmatization, 29–30, 47 synthetic scents, 39–40 violet, 87, 137 wakes (sillage), 88–89 See also perfume, visual representations of; perfumers perfume, visual representations of, 74–96 bottles, 79–80 Fumée d’ambre gris (Sargent), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 Nude in Backlighting, or The Eau de Cologne (Bonnard), 76, 77–78, 80 The Perfume of Roses (Curran), 177–79 The Soul of the Rose (Waterhouse), 44, 183–86, 188–89, 191, 193–96, 259n44 The Three Perfumes (Macdonald), 44, 61, 84–87, 175, 193 Perfume dos campos (Freire), 61–62 Perfume Makers, The (Ernst), 222–23, 224 “Perfume of Egypt, The” (Leadbeater), 137–38 Perfume of Roses, The (Curran), 177–79, 181 perfumers Coty, François, 79–80, 86 Dove, Roja, 215 Grossmith, 138–39, 190 Guerlain, 39–40, 61, 87, 201 Lundborg perfume house, 61, 65–66, 138, 139, 231, 232, 234, 259n71 olfactory aesthetics, 38 Piesse, Charles Henry, 43, 64, 201 Piesse, George William, 36–39, 53, 104, 220–21 self-positioning as artists, 38–40 Peris, The (Curran), 177, 181, 222 Perry, Lilla Cabot, 174 petrifaction, 219 Philips, Stephen, 205 Phillimore, Robert, 162 photography The Bridal Rose (Eickemeyer), 173–74 flash, 131 Hypnos (Day), 7, 8 Keller, Helen, 171, 172–74, 257n9 Ruth St Denis, 227 The Soul of the Rose (Barton), 193, 194 spirit, 79, 131 physiology, 40–41, 104, 147–48 Phythian, J. E., 153

Index Picasso, Pablo, 236 pictures, smelling, 97–113 Piesse, Charles Henry, 43, 64, 201 Piesse, George William Septimus, 36–39, 53, 104, 220–21 Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose (Burne-Jones), 194–95 Pinwell, George John, 124, 125 pisanelle ou la mort parfumée, La (D’Annunzio), 204–5 “Plea for the Sense of Smell, A” (Cranch), 29, 35, 47, 65 Pleasant Scent, A (Toulmouche), 44 plein air painting, 59, 61 Podmore, Frank, 108, 110 Pollock, Griselda, 70–71 Pollock, Jackson, 236 Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 73 Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”) (Watts), 20–28, 96, 170, 189, 219, 242n4, 258n13 Portrait of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 32 posters. See advertisements Post Pre-Raphaelitism Cadence of Autumn, The (De Morgan), 88 Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo, The (Stillman), 193 Legend of the Briar Rose (Burne-Jones), 206, 211 Lover’s World, The (Fortescue-Brickdale), 165–69, 174–75, 193, 257nn81–82 Magic Circle, The (Waterhouse), 69, 225 Night and Sleep (De Morgan), 81 Soul of the Rose, The (Waterhouse), 44, 183–86, 188–89, 191, 193–96, 259n44 Potato Eaters, The (van Gogh), 9, 83 potpourri, 119, 125–30, 214–15 Potpourri (Abbey), 127 Pot Pourri (Draper), 127–29, 214–15 Pot Pourri (Leslie), 126–27 Pot Pourri (Millais), 119, 128 Pre-Raphaelitism Autumn Leaves (Millais), 117–23, 126, 128, 136, 155 Blind Girl, The (Millais), 59, 148–57, 165, 169, 174, 183, 256n41 and Christianity, 157 Christ in the House of His Parents (Millais), 157 Found (Rossetti), 55–57, 59, 247n36, 247nn40–41 Ophelia (Millais), 157, 206, 215 pensive poetry, 121 stench, 54–59

273

Thoughts of the Past (Stanhope), 48, 55, 57, 58, 59, 124–25 Priestess of Delphi (Collier), 225, 226 Privat-Livemont, Henri, 88–89 Profumo (Russolo), 61, 92, 93, 95 Proserpine (Rossetti), 119, 120, 122 Proust, Marcel, 142–43 Pusey, Edward, 157, 160 Quiviger, François, 81 Rajah Coffee and Tea (Privat-Livemont), 88–89 Rayne, Martha Louise, 221 Realism Found Drowned (Watts), 56 Potato Eaters, The (van Gogh), 9, 83 Sisters, The (Pinwell), 124, 125 Realist Movement, 7–9 Redon, Odilon, 7, 215–16, 217 Rembrandt, 81 remembered sensations, 98–100 Repasseuses (Women Ironing) (Degas), 240n18 Return of the Dove to the Ark, The (Millais), 151 Revenge of the Flowers, The (Wertheimer), 211–12, 214 Reynolds, Joshua, 48, 155 Rheam, Henry Meynell, 258n13 the rhinencephalon, 41, 143–44 Richardson, Benjamin Ward, 187 Reiffenstein, Leo, 204 Rimmel, Eugène, 38–39, 139, 204 Rindisbacher, Hans, 10, 63–64, 96, 201 Rink, Paul, 44, 128 Rites of Spring, The (Diaghilev), 31 ritualism controversies, 160–65 Robinson, William, 23 Roger & Gallet perfume house, 61, 87 Roinard, Paul-Napoléon, 31 Roman Catholic Church. See Christianity “Roman de la Rose, Le” (Chaucer), 193–94 Romans of the Decadence, The (Couture), 204 Rosenfeld, Jason, 122, 136, 153 roses Alma-Tadema’s use of, 200 Attar of Roses (Mowbray), 222 Boudoir Rose, The (Schafer), 102 Briar Rose series (Burne-Jones), 206, 211 Bridal Rose, The (Eickemeyer), 173–74 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Sargent), 119–20, 121 Festival of Roses, The (Mowbray), 222 Grace Rose (Sandys), 128 Heart of the Rose, The (Macdonald), 195 Keller, Helen, photographs of, 171, 172–74, 257n9

274

Index

roses (continued) “Le Roman de la Rose” (Chaucer), 193–94 Perfume of Roses, The (Curran), 177–79, 181 Pilgrim in the Garden—The Heart of the Rose (Burne-Jones), 194–95 In a Rose Garden (Alma-Tadema), 200, 223, 260n14 Rose Harvest, The (Mowbray), 7, 222, 223 Rose in Bloom (Alcott), 182 Roses (Sudermann), 202 Roses of Heliogabalus, The (Alma-Tadema), 81, 113, 197–202, 204, 211, 228–29, 232–33 Roses of Heliogabalus, The (Reiffenstein), 204 Scent of Roses (Perry), 174 Scent of the Rose, The (Curran), 44, 180–82 Soul of the Rose, The (Barton), 193, 194 Soul of the Rose, The (Waterhouse), 44, 183–86, 188–89, 191, 193–96, 259n44 Woman with Roses or La mort d’Albine (Artigue), 208–9 See also flower symbolism Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Charles, 1, 3 Beata Beatrix, 119, 131–33 in Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1, 2 Found, 55–57, 59, 247n36, 247nn40–41 Girl at a Lattice, 52, 247n25 critical reviews of his poetry, 103 health issues, 57 incense, 3, 239n4 interest in scent representation, 244n62 interest in synesthesia, 32–33 Lady Lilith, 48, 69–70 Lucrezia Borgia, 105 Modernism as reaction to, 13 and Notes and Queries, 155 Pandora, 65, 66, 87 poetry, 103–5, 113, 121, 232 Proserpine, 119, 120, 122 and Siddall, Elizabeth, 1, 55, 131–33, 247n24 and Solomon, Simeon, 160 séances, 131 stench experiences, 55, 247n37 Venus Verticordia, 70–71, 169 and Watt’s Choosing, 242n4 Rossetti, William Michael, 71 Rothafel, Samuel “Roxy,” 235–36 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1 Rubens, Peter Paul, 83 Ruskin, John, 1, 2, 57, 59, 64, 122, 156 Russolo, Luigi, 61, 92, 93, 95

Saint of the Eastern Church, A (Solomon), 161–64, 225 Sala, George Augustus, 53 Salome Dancing Before Herod (Moreau), 48, 71–72, 147, 225 Sambourne, Edward Linley, 63 Sand, George, 117 Sandys, Frederick, 3, 69, 128, 134, 169, 183 Sandys, Winifred, 249n24 sanitation, 59–67, 69 Sargent, John Singer, 3, 136, 240n28 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 119–20, 121 Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), 74–78, 80, 219–20, 223, 225, 249n1 Scent (Johns), 236 Scent, The (Rink), 44, 128 scent as artistic medium criticisms, 29–30, 40–42, 47 Japanese cultural practices, 42–43 musical correspondences, 35–37 olfactory aesthetics, 41 performing arts, 30–31, 37–38, 225, 227, 235, 245n80 perfumery, 33–35, 38–39 proposals for, 29, 33–36 scented ritualism and sexuality, 158–65 scent-infused paintings, 3, 239n3 scent memories Autumn Leaves (Millais), 117–23, 126, 128, 136, 155 examples of paintings evoking, 117–20 and loss, 123–25 nostalgia, 120, 122, 124 personal nature of, 130 The Sisters (Pinwell), 124, 125 Scent of Roses (Perry), 174 Scent of the Abyss, The (Magritte), 236 Scent of the Rose, The (Curran), 44, 180–82 scent symbolism, 1–2, 7, 23–24 See also flower symbolism Schafer, Henry Thomas, 102 Schramm, Viktor, 43–46, 170, 219 Schultze, Max, 77–78 Schulz, Max, 152 science corpuscular theory, 77–78, 90, 95, 216 discovery of microorganisms, 77–79 germ theory, 65–66, 73, 213, 233 memory, 136–37 physiology, 40–41, 104, 147–48 sexology, 186–88, 209 Scott, Emily Maria Spaford, 98 Scriabin, Alexander, 31 Selfridges, 202–4 Sense of Smell, The (Brueghel), 83

Index Sense of Smell, The (Rubens), 83 senses art’s capacity to fool, 98–99 connection to intellect, 53 hierarchies, 22–23, 29, 38, 237 modern segregation, 13 training regimens, 100 sensory history, 4–5 sensory imagination, 103–7, 105–6, 108, 251n52 sensory overload (hyperesthesia) cities causing, 101–3 collective, 69 fasting girls, 102, 112 fears of, 112–13 A Flower Market, Old Rome (Waterhouse), 191 gendered stereotypes, 105–8 olfactory hallucinations, 28, 105–13, 143 paintings, 102–5 poetry, 103–4 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman), 110–12, 252n82, 252n84, 252n87 sensory perception, expectation’s impact on, 108 sensory recall autumnal imagery, 117 dried organic matter, 123, 125–28 ether, 133 exercises, 100–101 flower paintings, 97–98 interest in, 101 laudanum, 133 neurology, 143–44 nostalgic, 117, 119 remembered sensations, 98–100 research on, 142 scent-inspired visions, 130–31, 145 See also scent memories Sexton, George, 150 sexuality and flowers, 83, 181–83, 188–89, 259n61 homosexuality, 158–61 nose-genitals relationship, 187 promiscuity and derangement, 214 scented ritualism, 158–65 seduction, 69 sexology, 186–88, 209 Shairp, John Campbell, 103–4 Shaw, Byam, 165 Shelling Peas (Millais), 128 Shepherd, Gordon M., 142–43 Shepherd- Barr, Kristen, 142–43 Sherwood, James Manning, 157 Shields, T. E., 187, 259n52 Shiner, Larry, 15 Showalter, Elaine, 214

275

Shrine, The (Waterhouse), 170, 172, 191–92, 196 Sichel, Edith, 167 Siddal, Elizabeth, 1, 2, 55, 131, 133, 247n24 “‘Silent Highway’—Man, The” (Leech), 54, 55 Sin of Father Mouret, The (Zola), 205–8, 211, 213–14, 218, 260n14 Sisters, The (Pinwell), 124, 125 Sketchley, Rose, 196 Smart, William, 228 Smell (Molenaer), 81 smell, sense of aesthetics, 10 art history, 10–11, 13–14 artistic communication examples, 31–32 artistic engagements with, 30 central nervous system connections, 109 Christianity, 11, 241n33 connection to the mind, 53–54 cultural associations, 19–46 cultural attitudes, 4–5, 239n12 contradictory, 19–20, 45–46 filth, 20 Freudian perspectives, 11 gendered, 5–7, 44–45, 239n13 negative, 29–30 racist, 239n12 as uncivilized, 221 debates over role and significance, 101, 143–44 human, 41–43, 246n107 hyperosmia, 102 instruments for observing, 79and mental illness, 28 mysteriousness, 147–48 olfactory receptors, 77–78 race, 5-7, 47, 60, 73, 105, 144, 204, 239n12 the rhinencephalon, 41, 143–44 social historical studies, 14 training, 41–43 Smelling (Gutmann),2 170 smell scholarship, 14–15 Smith, Alison, 153 Smith, Mark M., 9, 13 smog, 62, 72–73 Snow, John, 65 Snow, Robert, 153–56 snub noses, 239n12, 240n18 soap industry, 60–62, 66 Society for Psychical Research, 107–8 Solomon, Simeon “ceremonial” works, 158, 208 The Deacon, 158 Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome, 164–65, 201, 257n78

276

Index

controversy over high church ritual, 160 homosexuality in paintings, 158–61 myrtle imagery, 162 Solomon, Simeon (continued) The Mystery of Faith, 158, 161 olfactory images, 3, 239n5 and Rossetti, Dante, 160 A Saint of the Eastern Church, 161–64, 225 and Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 162, 164 Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, 158–61, 164–65, 169 Somerville, Mary, 78 Song of Songs (Fort and Roinard), 31 sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, Les (Debussy), 31 Soul of the Rose, The (Barton), 193, 194 Soul of the Rose, The (Waterhouse), 44, 183–86, 188–89, 191, 193–96, 259n44 Spencer, Herbert, 104 Spirit Haunts the Year’s Last Hours, A (Tennyson), 117 spiritualism, 133–34, 138, 169, 192–96 See also Christianity; the paranormal Spring (Millais), 119, 124 Stacey, Michelle, 102 Staley, Allen, 162 Stamelman, Richard, 39, 67, 77 Stanhope, John Roddam Spencer health issues, 57 mentioned, 3 Thoughts of the Past, 48, 55, 57, 58, 59, 124–25 Starr, Sidney, 234–35 St. Denis, Ruth, 31, 225, 227 stench, 9, 47–73, 240n23 the Chadwick public health report, 51–53 cities, 49–54, 57, 59, 62–65, 67, 73, 247n25 cultural anxieties decline of, 79 depressive effects, 53 disease, 48, 50–54, 65–66, 69 moral, 53–54 sanitation ending, 64 defense mechanisms, 51–52 Found (Rossetti), 55–57, 59, 247n36, 247nn40–41 impact on scent in art, 73 industrial, 62 London, 49–51, 54, 57, 59, 63, 67, 73, 247n25 negative cultural associations impacting, 47–48, 54 Pre-Raphaelitism, 54–59 “The ‘Silent Highway’—Man” (Leech), 54, 55 Thoughts of the Past (Stanhope), 48, 55, 57, 58, 59, 124–25

“Vampyre: No Superstition, The” (Punch magazine), 50 Victorian satirical cartoons, 81–82 See also miasma Stephens, F. G., 70, 122 Stillman, Marie Spartali, 193 Stoker, Bram, 67, 69 Stott, Annette, 176 Sudermann, Hermann, 202 sulfur, 225 Sully, James, 108, 252n90 Sultan’s Favorite, The (Giménez y Martin), 7 The Sultan’s Favorite, 7 Summer (Waterhouse), 183 Swinburne, Algernon Charles criticism of, 103 in Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1, 2 interest in scent representation, 244n62 interest in synesthesia, 32–33 Lesbia Brandon, 227 on Moore’s Azaleas, 128 poetry, 30 on Rossetti’s Pandora, 65 and Solomon, Simeon, 162, 164 on Venus Verticordia, 71 symbolism. See European Symbolism; flower symbolism; scent symbolism Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Whistler), 44 Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Whistler), 128 synesthesia colors representing scents, 93 correspondence, 32 flower descriptions, 28–29 poetry, 28–29 Victorian interest in, 32–33, 231–33 vision, 232–33 Synnott, Anthony, 11, 15 Takách von Gyongos-Halasz, Béla, 94, 95, 225, 234, 250n46 Tardif, Étienne, 209 “Tears, Idle Tears” (Tennyson), 121 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 117, 121, 124, 170, 186 Terry, Ellen, 26–28, 243n27, 243n33–34, 243n36 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 150, 156 Thérèse of Lisieux (Saint), 147 Thoreau, Henry David, 24, 172 Thoré-Bürger, Théophile, 32, 38, 229, 244n56 Thornycroft, Helen, 197, 198 Thoughts of the Past (Stanhope), 48, 55, 57, 58, 59, 124–25

Index Three Perfumes, The (Macdonald), 44, 61, 84–87, 175, 193 Tichener, Edward, 142 Toorop, Jan, 87–88 Toulmouche, Auguste, 44 Transcendentalism, 172–73 Trippi, Peter, 183 Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, A (Hartmann), 31, 37–38, 235, 245n80 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 30, 197 Tuke, Daniel Hack, 111 Turgenev, Ivan, 182, 189 Turner, J. M. W., 59 Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost (Solomon), 158–61, 164–65, 169 Unconscious Patient, The (Rembrandt), 81 “Vampyre: No Superstition, The” (Punch magazine), 50 van Gogh, Vincent, 9, 83, 125 Venus Verticordia (Rossetti), 70–71, 169 Verbeek, Caro, 15 Vereshchagin, Vasily, 251n59 Vestiges of Creation, The (Chambers), 35 Victim of Flowers (Munkácsy), 212 Victorian Classicism Alma-Tadema’s paintings of women smelling flowers, 200 At the Garden Shrine (Godward), 218, 219 Musk (Moore), 102–3, 113 New Perfume, The (Godward), 61, 202–4 Priestess of Delphi (Collier), 225, 226 Roses of Heliogabalus, The (Alma-Tadema), 81, 113, 197–202, 204, 211, 228–29, 232–33 violets, 20, 22–25, 87, 119, 125, 137, 258n13 Violets (Rheam), 258n13 Violet’s Message, The (Millais), 119 vision Freud on, 11 nineteenth century fascination, 11–13 opium, 131–33 sense hierarchies, 22–23, 29, 38, 237 synesthetic, 232–33 Western privileging of, 13 visions, scent-inspired, 130–31, 145 visual culture, 14 visual representations of scent, 2, 74–96, 113 challenges, 96 color and form, 90, 93–96 depictions of olfactory activities, 82–83 desire for, 79–80 Divisionism, 90, 92, 93–96 Dutch and Flemish, 81–83

277

epistemological motivations, 77 everyday objects, 10 fragrance trails, 87–90, 197–98, 250n29 historical contexts, 12–13 historical overview, 47–48 international continuities, 9–10 miasma, 67, 87, 233 olfactory experiences of, 97–113 paintings of the five senses, 83, 249n24 painting techniques, 44, 167, 216 Renaissance paintings, 81 scientific discoveries contextualizing, 77–79 sensorial suggestion techniques, 84–87 smog, 72–73 spirit images, 87 visual language, 80–84 See also butterflies, fairies; flower symbolism; incense; perfume, rainbows, visual representations of; stench; individual paintings by title Vortriede, Helen, 142 Vosnaki, Elena, 215 Wagner, Richard, 30, 197 Wandering Thoughts (Millais), 122 Ward, Mary, 78 Wardle, Arthur, 249n91 Warhol, Andy, 236 Warner, Malcolm, 121 Warner, Marina, 148 Warns, Samuel, 134–36 Waterhouse, John William, 3 A Flower Market, Old Rome, 191, 211, 228 flower-women associations, 182–83 in France, 240n28 influence of women artists, 193 The Magic Circle, 69, 225 The Shrine, 170, 172, 191–92, 196 The Soul of the Rose, 44, 183–86, 188–89, 191, 193–96, 259n44 Summer, 183 and Watt’s Choosing, 242n4 Waters, Michael, 26 Watson, Peter, 183 Watts, George Frederic, 3 Eve Tempted, 83, 84 Found Drowned, 56 in France, 240n28 Hope, 24 Portrait of Dame Ellen Terry (“Choosing”), 20–28, 96, 170, 189, 219, 242n4, 258n13 wife (Ellen Terry), 26–28, 243n27, 243n33– 34, 243n36 Wertheimer, Gustav, 211–12, 214

278 Whistler, James McNeill, 1, 2, 44, 103, 128 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 30, 32, 202, 208 Woman with Roses or La mort d’Albine (Artigue), 208–9 women associations with scent, 5, 20, 106–7, 142, 239n13 mental illness associations, 28, 106–13, 214 the New Woman, 183, 186 olfactory images, 5–7, 240n16, 240n18 susceptibility to scent erotics, 188 See also women smelling flowers Women in a Garden (Toorop), 87–88 Women of Algiers (Delacroix), 229–30 women’s liberation, 174–76, 181, 185, 258n13 women smelling flowers, 170 Alma-Tadema’s Victorian Classicism, 200 American painters, 258n18 erotics, 176–86, 188 symbolic language, 170, 172 and women’s liberation, 174–76, 258n13 See also individual paintings by title

Index “Wonders of a London Water Drop, The” (Punch cartoon), 233, 234, 263n4 Woolner, Thomas, 72 Wyld, William, 62 Yakunchikova, Maria, 175, 233–34 “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman), 110–12, 252n82, 252n84, 252n87 Yvonne Draper (Draper), 128 Zola, Émile The Belly of Paris, 211 harmful flowers, 212–13 Nana, 211, 213 scent erotics, 209, 211 The Sin of Father Mouret, 205–8, 211, 213–14, 218, 260n14 use of scents, 30 Zwaardemaker, Hendrik, 37, 79