History of advertising tactic that he used was to associate the Pears brand with high culture and quality. Most famously, he used the painting "Bubbles" by John Everett Millais as an advertisement by adding a bar of Pears soap into the foreground. Barratt continued this theme with a series of adverts of well groomed middle-class children, associating Pears with domestic comfort and aspirations of high society. Barratt introduced many of the crucial ideas that lie behind successful advertising and these were widely circulated in his day. He constantly stressed the importance of a strong and exclusive brand image for Pears and of emphasizing
The North-West Passage was promoting at the time. The female figure was a professional model, Mrs Ellis, who was later used in another painting, "Stitch, Stitch, Stitch" (1876). The right side of the painting originally depicted two of the sailor's grandchildren, who were modelled by John and Alice Millais, two of Millais' own children. They were shown looking at a globe of the world. But after Millais completed the painting, he became unhappy with the figures of the children, thinking that they distracted the eye from the main figure. He cut out this section of the painting and replaced it with a screen,