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 North-West Passage The North-West Passage The North-West Passage is an 1874 painting by John Everett Millais. It depicts an elderly sailor sitting at a desk, with his daughter seated in a stool beside him. He stares out at the viewer, while she reads from a log-book. On the desk is a large chart depicting complex passageways between incompletely charted islands. Millais exhibited the painting with the subtitle "It might be done and England should do it", a line imagined to be spoken by the aged sailor. The title and subtitle refer to the repeated failure of British expeditions to find the northwest