Now turn to section 4 on page 6. Section 4 You will hear a museum curator giving a presentation about her museum's collection of perfume containers, also known as perfume ornaments. First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40 on pages 6 and 7. Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40. Good morning and welcome to the Walden Gallery.
In today's open lecture I'm going to be talking about our collection of perfume ornaments, or containers. These beautiful objects now form a significant part of the museum's collection and are very popular with the public. But this has not always been the case.
Up until relatively recently, the large collection of perfume ornaments held in store, donated by Lady Walden at the beginning of the last century, was not considered to be of much interest and was not on show to the general public. Then, as late as 1989, a visiting professor from the Victoria and Albert Museum commented that some of the objects were worth a great deal, and so the display was created, much as you see it here today. Now before I say anything more about the perfume containers, I thought I'd briefly touch on the background to the development of perfumes themselves.
In the West, perfumery really began as late as the eleventh century. Bathing and laundering were considered hazardous undertakings, because even though there were ample supplies of water, it was often dirty or even infected. As a consequence, as you can imagine, the air was heavy with unpleasant smells, which had to be countered or covered up.
In those early days, perfumes were in solid form and mainly made from spices, leaves, and animal fixatives in paste form, for example musk and ambergris. Wealthy people, the only people who could afford them, carried small globular vessels known as pomanders. I've brought out one ornament from the collection, the oldest one, in fact, from the fourteenth century, which I'll pass round for you to sample.
These pomanders are solid paste balls made of ambergris, impregnated with fragrance. The name was derived from the French for apple of ambergris. They must have had a powerful aroma in those days, because even now you can smell the fragrance.
Now, during the medieval period, basically up until the sixteenth century, perfumes not only made your surroundings smell sweeter, they were believed to have other special properties. Researchers in the nineteenth century revealed that in medieval times people thought perfumes could help overcome all kinds of bodily ills. But only recently, researchers at our museum have found that they were also believed to significantly raise the spirits of the wearer.
Turning now to some more technical details, with the advent of liquid perfume from the mid-eighteenth century, craftsmen had to use precision techniques to ensure there was an airtight seal on the container. It is clear that however beautiful these seemingly fragile objects were, they were essentially utilitarian, designed to stop the extremely valuable substances inside them from evaporating. Let's turn now to have a look at some of the key developments in perfume containers in the last two hundred years or so.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, the vinaigrette came into vogue. The vinaigrette was a miniature box which opened on a hinge, containing a tiny sponge soaked with perfume. This was placed under a grill through which you could smell the fragrance.
It was widely used to carry the highly corrosive scent known as vinegar water, hence the name. The outer box could be made of any material, but the lining was gold because the perfume tended to corrode other substances. From the mid-nineteenth century, vinaigrettes were replaced by more conventional bottles.
They were often made of glass, of course, but metal was another common material used, and very occasionally they were made of more unusual materials like horn. By now these beautiful objects were more affordable. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, and the bottles were mass-produced, and thus available not just to the very wealthy.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one company above all became associated with the design and production of perfume bottles—the Tiffany Company. They developed a wide range of designs, most notably based on those of the furniture of the period. Their particular achievement was their stylish and clever working of crystal.
Although these perfume ornaments were very expensive, Tiffany & Co. were able to use catalogs to reach a wider clientele. Many innovative designs were used in perfume ornaments produced in the 1920s and 30s.
The most notable was probably the Vanity. This was an ingeniously designed case used not only for holding perfume, but also makeup, in a whole maze of tiny additional compartments. It was made in the first instance of ivory, but later bakelite was used—the resinous plastic which was so popular with all kinds of designers of the period.
Now, I've brought along a selection of the items in the collection which I've set out here. If you'd like to come and gather with me, I'd be happy to help you. That is the end of Section 4. You now have half a minute to check your answers.
That is the end of the Listening Test. You now have ten minutes to transfer your answers to the Listening Answer Sheet.