John Everett Millais Millais's interest in subjects connected to Britain's history and expanding empire. Millais also achieved great popularity with his paintings of children, notably "Bubbles" (1886) – famous, or perhaps notorious, for being used in the advertising of "Pears soap" – and "Cherry Ripe". His last project (1896) was to be a painting entitled "The Last Trek." Based on his illustration for his son's book, it depicted a white hunter lying dead in the African veldt, his body contemplated by two Africans. His many landscape paintings of this period usually depict difficult or dangerous terrain. The first of these, "Chill October" (1870)
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