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.
Isabella (Millais painting) Isabella (Millais painting) Isabella (1849), also known as Lorenzo and Isabella, is a painting by John Everett Millais, which was his first work in the Pre-Raphaelite style, created shortly after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the previous year. It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, and is now in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The painting illustrates an episode from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron novel "Lisabetta e il testo di bassilico" (1349 - 1353), reprised by John Keats's poem, "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil", which describes the relationship between Isabella, the