Thomas J. Barratt to be a well known catch phrase well into the twentieth century. Barratt was awarded a Guinness World Record in 2014 for being considered the world's first brand manager, a job he held for A&F Pears from 1865. Barratt was keen to equate Pears with quality and high culture through his campaign methods. He acquired works of art to use in the advertisements, most famously John Everett Millais' painting "Bubbles", which he turned into an advertisement by adding a bar of Pears soap in the foreground. Millais was said to be unhappy about the alteration, but he could do nothing,
The North-West Passage was promoting at the time. The female figure was a professional model, Mrs Ellis, who was later used in another painting, "Stitch, Stitch, Stitch" (1876). The right side of the painting originally depicted two of the sailor's grandchildren, who were modelled by John and Alice Millais, two of Millais' own children. They were shown looking at a globe of the world. But after Millais completed the painting, he became unhappy with the figures of the children, thinking that they distracted the eye from the main figure. He cut out this section of the painting and replaced it with a screen,