Bubbles

Millais painted this in 1886 and called it A Child's World. The boy blowing soap bubbles was his own five-year-old grandson, William James, who was stuck with the nickname Bubbles for the rest of his life and grew up to be a Royal Navy admiral. Then commerce got hold of it. A soap manufacturer bought the picture outright, along with the copyright, added a bar of Pears soap into the corner, and turned the whole thing into one of the most reproduced advertisements of the Victorian age. That caused a proper row in the art world about whether a serious painter should let his work sell soap. The single fragile bubble the boy watches was an old symbol for how short life is, which sits oddly on a poster. The original is on long loan to the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool.