These early French baluster-shaped perfume bottles with stoppers, made of gold and enamel, date from the 1720s. They are from the extensive Givaudan Collection in Geneva and are part of the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / Photo courtesy of Givaudan.
A “vinaigrette” in the shape of a butterfly, shown open and closed. As modern as the exterior looks, the scent holder was made, of gold and enamel, in Geneva in the late 1700s. Vinaigrettes did often contain vinegar or some other strong smell, and were carried, to be sniffed at will to mask the smells of a more sanitation-challenged age. The vinaigrette shown is from the Givaudan Collection and is part of the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC . / Photo courtesy of Givaudan.
Not so different from the fanciful enameled boxes people collect today, this perfume bottle in the shape of a red plum is made of enameled copper and gilt metal. It was made in England between 1765 and 1770. From the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / From the Givaudan Collection. Photo courtesy of Givaudan.
Hillwood is famous for Marjorie Merriweather Post’s collection of Russian Imperial Easter eggs by Faberge, so this perfume bottle inside its egg-shaped case follows Post’s collector instincts. It’s made of enameled gold and is probably 19th-century Russian. From the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / Photo by Brian Searby.
These 18th-century genre figures, including the Commedia dell’Arte character Pierrot, at bottom, are different from your grandmother’s knickknacks in one particular way: Their heads pop off to dispense perfume. From the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / MyLittleBird photo.
More genre-figure perfume bottles in the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. Let’s see, there’s an abbot and a monk on the left, a fair damsel and a nursing mother on the right. Up top is none other than a casually posed William Shakespeare. / MyLittleBird photo.
Fashion designers entered into the perfume game the early 1920s, with unique scents created for the Paris couturier Charles Frederick Worth. The crystal company Lalique made the “skyscraper” bottle, left, for Worth’s Je Reviens in 1932 (think: that’s soon after the Chrysler and Empire State buildings were built). Rene Lalique made the blue orb, center, for the House of Worth’s first scent, Dans la Nuit, in 1924. Right, Guerlain’s classic Shalimar, launched in Paris in 1926, can still be found in this signature “bat” shaped bottle, originally made for the famous French perfumer by the crystal house Baccarat. From the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / MyLittleBird photo.
Early perfume bottles were often part of the elaborate (among court society, at least) early-18th-century French toilette, the elaborate dressing and primping ritual. The toile (French for cloth)-covered table has come down to us as the dressing or vanity table. Except in the case of a Marjorie Merriweather Post, though, a 20th- or 21st-century dressing table is unlikely to hold an object as elaborate as this pincushion from a circa-1849 silver-gilt dressing-table set. From the “Perfume & Seduction” exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington DC. / Photo by Brian Searby.
COMPARED WITH the perfume bottles on exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, our current-day flacons, even the most whimsical ones, are plain Janes. Imagine your favorite scent being contained in a little porcelain figure of a monk or a country maiden, or even the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.
Hillwood’s “Perfume & Seduction” certainly seduced me. All of a sudden those dreadful little figurines people collect seem charming, not gauche. Well, almost. The display here of genre figures—typical characters of a town, just as you might find in a crèche scene—date from the 18th century and have the workmanship to prove it.
If the perfume holders are special—made of enameled gold or copper, glass, porcelain, hardstones such as agate and bloodstone—the people they were intended for were the special people of the day, starting with the men and women who frequented the court of Louis XIV. Lesser folks could not have afforded to commission such works.
Lesser folks may not even have imagined such things existed. Or perhaps when they saw a wealthy gentleman passing by holding a vinegar-filled vinaigrette to his nose they might note how the fancy folks couldn’t stand the stench of the world at large. (Nor might we Americans, who have banished smell from just about everywhere. Been to a supermarket lately? Does it smell like food? God forbid. It smells mostly of, well, not much. But on balance, today’s lack of smells is better than the raw sewage, rotting garbage, tanneries and abattoirs that gave Paris her heady 18th-century fragrance.)
Today fragrance can be a final touch before a man or woman marches off to the theater. Roll back the calendar a few hundred years, though, and it had a bigger role as the wealthy developed a new preoccupation with personal hygiene. What now seems like a grace note may then have been a saving grace.
The little Dacha and the Adirondack Building on the Hillwood grounds are the perfect environments for exhibiting small, precious items. An exhibit in 2015 of the jewelry Pierre Cartier and Post collaborated on was held in the Adirondack; “Perfume” is housed in the Dacha.
There’s an associated show-and-smell exhibit at Hillwood. Turn right inside the Greenhouse and you get glorious orchids, those showoffs; turn left and you can tour many of the plants and flowers that go into making perfumes and flavorings. There are the usual suspects—lavender, vanilla, gardenia, jasmine, cinnamon, rosemary and Provence roses—but nature isn’t quite as cooperative with curators as inanimate objects are: Most of the plants are not in bloom right now. Still, I learned that about 8,000 jasmine blooms render less than a teaspoon of essential oil and that about 75 percent of all perfumes use roses as a floral note. A sign stated that the Provence rose is intensely scented and therefore much in demand, but honestly the one or two blossoms didn’t smell that strong to me, even when I poked my nose in one.
I also learned that potpourri consisted of a mixture of dried flowers and was devised in Paris in the late 1600s, long before it migrated to every overdressed B&B in America in the 1980s. Actually, 18th-century European aristocrats would probably approve: They placed potpourri on tables and mantels, burned incense and aromatic pastilles, carried vinaigrettes. I don’t know about the seductive powers of perfume, but I do know they make for a better-smelling world.
—Nancy McKeon
Perfume & Seduction, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, 4155 Linnean Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008; 202-686-5807; hillwood museum.org. The exhibit runs through June 9, 2019. Tickets are $18 ($15 for those 65 and older).
