The exhibition Smell the Art: Fleeting – Scents in Color will be on view as soon as the Mauritshuis opens it doors again, until and including 29 August 2021. While the museum is closed you can experience an interactive virtual see-and-smell tour with four real scents!
During the tour, Dutch culinary journalist Joël Broekaert and Mauritshuis curator Ariane van Suchtelen take you as a viewer digitally behind the closed doors of the exhibition for a fantastic tour. View and smell the beautiful paintings of the exhibition. The fragrance box contains scent pumps which allow you to smell the scents at the same time that they appear in the tour.
Scented flowers and perfumes, foul-smelling canals and unpleasant body odors, smell and well-being, new aromas from far-away lands (spices, tobacco, coffee and tea), the disappearing smells of the bleaching fields, old crafts and more. Can life in the seventeenth century be captured in smell? How are smell (and scent) portrayed? What significance did people attach to smell? And what aromatic connotations do artworks have? In this exhibition, the Mauritshuis will undertake smell-historical research. In the vicinity of the art, various historic scents will be prepared to bring the paintings in the exhibition to life.
David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), The Alchemist, ca. 1650
Mauritshuis, The Hague