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)
Isabella (Millais painting) violently kicks a frightened dog while cracking a nut. Millais and his colleague William Holman Hunt had both produced drawings illustrating episodes from the poem, but only Millais worked his up into a full painting (Hunt's 1868 "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" used a completely different composition). Both drawings used distorted perspective and angular poses characteristic of medieval art, by which the Pre-Raphaelites were influenced. Millais also draws on the precedent of William Hogarth's satirical depictions of an arranged marriage "Marriage à-la-mode". The painting is structured with deliberately distorted perspective, elongating the right hand side of the table and