“Intoxicated by turpentine”: An Olfactory History of Painting (1750-1939)

Project Information

PaintOdor

Grant agreement ID: 845788

DOI

10.3030/845788

Project closed

EC signature date 26 April 2019

Start date 1 August 2019

End date 31 July 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 196 707,84

EU contribution

€ 196 707,84

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE LUMIERE LYON 2
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PaintOdor (“Intoxicated by turpentine”: An Olfactory History of Painting (1750-1939))

Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2021-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The recent pandemic has greatly affected researchers, but the symptoms of anosmia associated with Covid-19 have also reminded us that the sense of smell is at the heart of many social issues, giving new momentum to the already expanding smell studies. The limited access to museums also reminded us that admiring pieces of art could not be achieved satisfactorily through digital technology alone and highlighted the multi-sensory nature of the museum experience. The context of the pandemic made the Paintodor project more difficult to carry out on the one hand, but it also gave it a different dimension, revealing that the sense of smell, which is usually excluded from digital technologies, had been of major importance not only in the material history of art, but also in the acquisition of knowledge and in artisanal practices.
As planned, the objective of the research project, unveiling the hidden olfactory history of painting will be achieved through two main outcomes : a book on the smell of paint (1750-1950) whose final manuscript will be submitted in April as well as a museum device reconstructing the odor of a painter's studio in the early nineteenth century which will be inaugurated in November 2022.
By questioning the numerous allusions to the smell of paint present in a very broad range of historical sources from the second half of the18th century to the first half of the 20th century, this project confirmed the hypotheses formulated in the project application, but also raised many important issues so that the book in progress includes seven more chapters than originally planned. Among the elements that this research has brought to light, we could first point out of all the way in which the question of the smell of painting subverts the hierarchies of knowledge about art. For example, at the time of the rediscovery of the Flemish primitives, mentions of the smell of paint are very common in accounts of the invention of oil painting. Although the anecdote that the smell of paint had uncovered the innovation of turpentine was present as early as Vasari's classical text in the sixteenth century, by the nineteenth century the smell of paint was no longer mentioned in scholarly works, while popular works and fiction took up the motif. Similarly, an analysis of medical discourse reveals that doctors have based hierarchies between artists, craftsmen and workers on the extent to which they were affected by the smell of paint.
The last chapter of the book will present a historiographical reflection on the reconstitution of the smell of a painter's studio by the Fine-Arts Museum of Lyon, which constitutes the second outcome of this project. This device will both shed light on the history of the material culture of painting through its olfactory dimension (i.e. Paintodor) to a wide audience and enhance an important element of the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts: the color cabinet of the painter Fleury Richard, which contains 113 envelopes of pigments as well as utensils for preparing oil colors dating from the time when this practice disappeared in favor of industrially produced colors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work carried out so far consists firstly in consulting a very wide range of historical documents witnessing the importance of the smell of paint in the sensory landscape of the period under study. Meetings and online interviews with specialists in the history of material culture as well as restorers have enabled me to better understanding some of the issues raised by the written sources. The necessary material for the writing of the book has thus been gathered, making it possible to determine a ten-chapter structure.
Moreover, several articles and papers has allowed the dissemination of the first research results.
Built on this research, the project of historical reconstruction of the smell of a painter's studio in collaboration with the Lyon Fine-Arts Museum (secondment) has been considerably delayed by the pandemic circumstances despite the strong support provided by the cultural department of the Museum. The curator in charge of the 19th century collections, S. Paccoud, immediately encouraged me to work with the color cabinet of Fleury Richard, a colorist painter from Lyon at the beginning of the 19th century, whose studio collection is owned by the museum (private diary, archives, etc.).
Along with the consultation of these documents at the Museum, the first step was to analyze the pigments to better understand them. This led to two sessions of analysis carried out on the raw pigments and then on the paintings by a team of scientists from Université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1: Amina Bensalah-Ledoux (Institut Lumière Matière), Davy Carole (Laboratoire Multi-matériaux et interfaces), Cécile Le Luyer (ILM), Gérad Panczer (ILM) and Anne Pillonnel (ILM). The results of the analyses have been presented at a public lecture at the Lyon Fine-Arts Museum, on a radio program and are the topic of two collective articles in preparation which will be submitted to two open access journals.
Thanks to the advice of a renowned restorer and specialist of the 19th-century material culture of painting, B. Trémolière, we identified four smells dominating the atmosphere of the painter’s studio: rabbit-skin glue, turpentine, varnishes, and linseed oil. During a visit at the Center for Research and Restoration of Museum of France organized by M.-A. Paulin, a restorer, the exchanges with the restoration team gave me precious details concerning the reconstruction of varnishes used in the 18th century, which contained several natural resins still used today in perfumery. With the perfume composition company Givaudan (a long-time patron of the museum), a meeting with perfumers who will prepare the olfactory reconstructions as well as a perfume evoking the different components of the smell of a painter’s studio has been scheduled for March 2022 with a goal to present the project to the Museum in November 2022.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The scarce research on the relationship between art and olfaction is devoted to the use of smells in art or to the representation of perfumes in the visual arts, no study has yet been conducted on the smell of painting. This research therefore provides a new contribution to both art history and the history of olfactive culture. Studying the history of painting from the perspective of olfactive culture enables to build interdisciplinary research and to establish links between traditionally separate research fields such as the history of art and that of material culture. Intended for a wide audience, the book aims to renew both the conceptions of art history and those related to the place of the sense of smell in the creation and acquisition of knowledge. The impact of the olfactory museum device will be to familiarize the museum's public with the history of the material culture of pictorial art and to enhance an important part of the fine-arts museum's collections.
The research carried out has reinforced many of my hypotheses on the use of the sense of smell in the acquisition of different types of knowledge. It will have an important impact on the rest of my career by giving me the material to develop a new and broader research project on the history of knowledge obtained through olfaction. It will also allow me to continue my collaborations with museums and professionals of the perfume industry and to contribute actively to the current development of research in this field.

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