William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme a painting by Edmund Leighton. Lever's rival in the soap industry, A & F Pears, had taken the lead in using art for marketing by buying paintings such as "Bubbles" by John Everett Millais to promote its products. Lever's response was to acquire similarly illustrative works, and he later bought 'The New Frock' by William Powell Frith to promote the Sunlight soap brand. In 1922 he founded the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight in Cheshire which he dedicated to his late wife Elizabeth. William Lever was born on 19 September 1851 at 16 Wood Street, Bolton, Lancashire, England.
Esther (Millais painting) paintings by Titian, whose techniques of colouring Millais imitates, along with the modelling of the face and the characteristic "Titian blonde" hair. This also compares with the lush red locks of Millais's earlier picture "The Bridesmaid" and with some contemporary works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Millais's biographer Marion Spielmann wrote that the painting was "the most modernly treated of Millais's early works...more consonant in its strong harmony with the audacious brilliancy of the present day [1898] than the more solid strength of forty years ago." Esther (Millais painting) Esther (1865) is a painting by John Everett Millais depicting the central