Bubbles (painting) Bubbles (painting) Bubbles, originally titled A Child's World, is a painting by Sir John Everett Millais that became famous when it was used over many generations in advertisements for Pears soap. During Millais's lifetime it led to widespread debate about the relationship between art and advertising. The painting was one of many child pictures for which Millais had become well known in his later years. It was modelled by his five-year-old grandson William Milbourne James and was based on 17th-century Dutch precursors in the tradition of vanitas imagery, which commented upon the transience of life. These sometimes depicted young boys
Pears' Cyclopaedia Pears' Cyclopaedia Pears' Cyclopaedia is a one-volume encyclopaedia published in the United Kingdom. Pears' Soap launched the original "Pears' Shilling Cyclopaedia" in December 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The first edition contained an English dictionary, a medical dictionary, a gazetteer and atlas, desk information and a compendium of general knowledge entitled "A Mass of Curious and Useful Information and Things that everyone ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and the other Topics of Ordinary Conversation". Each edition traditionally featured an atlas, a gazetteer, a chronological list of events, a list of prominent people (past