Thomas J. Barratt to be a well known catch phrase well into the twentieth century. Barratt was awarded a Guinness World Record in 2014 for being considered the world's first brand manager, a job he held for A&F Pears from 1865. Barratt was keen to equate Pears with quality and high culture through his campaign methods. He acquired works of art to use in the advertisements, most famously John Everett Millais' painting "Bubbles", which he turned into an advertisement by adding a bar of Pears soap in the foreground. Millais was said to be unhappy about the alteration, but he could do nothing,
The Conjurer (painting) seems to exemplify the Flemish proverb: "He who lets himself be fooled by conjuring tricks loses his money and becomes the laughing stock of children." Another Flemish proverb, published and widely distributed ca 1480 in Bosch's hometown of 's-Hertogenbosch about the time of this painting, is: "No one is so much a fool as a willful fool." Bosch had used other proverbs as the basis of his painting, such as "The world is a haystack, and each man plucks from it what he can" for his painting, the Hay Wagon. Elina Gertsman's article about this painting explores this painting from