Ariane van Suchtelen, curator at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, had looked at an Amsterdam cityscape (and canalscape) by Jan van der Heyden many times before she noticed the privy beside a bridge. Once one notices it, one can’t help but see the woman washing clothes in the canal a few feet away. She might as well be washing the clothes in the outhouse, and one empathizes too with a couple of nearby swans, who may be destined to transform into ugly (or at least smelly) ducklings.
Van Suchtelen happened to see this detail while working on the Mauritshuis exhibit “Smell the Art: Fleeting Scents in Color,” which invites synaesthetic experiences of the visual and olfactory. My article on the show appears in Artnet News today.
In the article, I address the “fragrance box” the museum is shipping to the public to experience approximations of 17th century Dutch smells; the question whether such sensory packages, which provide authentic experiences rather than reproductions, have a future for museums even post-pandemic; and some of the science of how we experience smells and ways our “smell memory” has lost some of the scents depicted and implied in works of Rembrandt and other Golden Age Dutch painters.
Here’s the link again to the Artnet piece. Update (3/18): A new piece out in Smithsonian magazine quotes extensively from my Artnet article. Update (3/19): Travel + Leisure has also drawn heavily from the piece. Update (3/21): So does Newser.