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.
John Guille Millais embraced horticulture, hunting including big game hunting and wildfowl. As a boy he made a collection of birds shot around the Perthshire coast of Scotland where he spent much of his childhood. This formed the basis of a lifetime collection of around 3,000 specimens that he later housed in a private museum in Horsham in West Sussex, England. Specimens from this collection were depicted by his father in his painting "The Ruling Passion" (also known as "The Ornithologist"). John Guille himself painted a bird in his father's painting "Dew-Drenched Furze". Millais began his career in the army with the Seaforth