Bubbles

Bubbles, first exhibited as A Child's World, is an oil painting on canvas by John Everett Millais, dated 1886; owned by Unilever, it has been on long-term loan to the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight since 2006.

By the mid-1880s Millais, once a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, had long since moved to darker tones and looser handling, and much of his work was devoted to pictures of children. The sitter was his young grandson William Milbourne James. According to the biography by the painter's son J. G. Millais, the picture was made for his own pleasure after he saw the boy blowing soap bubbles through a pipe; because real bubbles vanish too quickly, he had a glass sphere made to study the light and colour.

The boy, in a velvet suit with a ruffled collar, sits in a dim space with a bowl of suds in his lap, gazing up at a bubble. The motif comes from seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting, where bubbles stand for the brevity of life; a young plant in a pot and a broken pot on the ground underline the contrast of growth and decay.

The painting was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886 and bought by Sir William Ingram for The Illustrated London News. Thomas J. Barratt, managing director of A & F Pears, then bought it from Ingram for £2,200 together with the copyright, and sought Millais's permission to add a bar of Pears soap so that the image could be used in advertising; the painter, at first uneasy, came round to the idea when shown the proofs. The campaign made the image famous and stirred debate about art and commerce: the novelist Marie Corelli accused Millais in The Sorrows of Satan of selling his talent for soap, and later withdrew the charge after he explained that he no longer held the copyright. William James, who became an admiral in the Royal Navy, was known as 'Bubbles' for the rest of his life. Lever Brothers acquired Pears in 1914, and the canvas, about 102.8 by 73.6 cm, was lent to the Royal Academy before moving to Port Sunlight.