The story
William Hesketh Lever sold Sunlight Soap by the ton, and from the 1880s he built a whole village, Port Sunlight, to house the people who made it, with cottages, gardens and eventually an art gallery at its centre. He opened it in 1922 in memory of his wife Elizabeth, Lady Lever, and stocked it from his own collection.
Lever had started buying pictures partly to use them in his soap advertising, and the gallery keeps one of the finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite painting anywhere, glowing canvases by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais.
One picture closes the circle. Millais's Bubbles, a small boy watching a soap bubble rise, had been turned into a famous advertisement for a rival soap firm before it ended up here, in the gallery of the man who built an empire on lather. Around the paintings Lever set his Wedgwood, Chinese porcelain and Greek and Roman sculpture, the whole gallery laid out for the villagers to walk through on a Sunday.
Collection
10 works
The Beguiling of MerlinEdward Burne-Jones, 1872
The ScapegoatWilliam Holman Hunt, 1854
The Triumph of CleopatraWilliam Etty, 1821
BubblesJohn Everett Millais, 1886
The Black BrunswickerJohn Everett Millais, 1860
A Tale from the DecameronJohn William Waterhouse, 1916
A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the FordJohn Everett Millais, 1857
Sibylla PalmiferaDante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866
Lady Hamilton (1761–1815), as a BacchanteÉlisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1790
The Blessed DamozelDante Gabriel Rossetti, 1879