ABSTRACT
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, advertisements that based their message entirely around imagery began to appear and circulate en masse among all the industrialized nations of Europe. Great Britain, a leader both in industrialized production and in the display of commodities through exhibitions, also pioneered this visual advertising. Manufacturers of the newest commodities, such as brand-name packaged soap, were among the fi rst to turn to this new promotional technique.1 Yet, while the makers of soap and cigarettes promoted new products with novel methods, the pictorial themes they chose-their visual motifs-remained quite traditional, at least initially. In 1886, for instance, the Pears Soap Company purchased the rights to a painting by a renowned pre-Raphaelite (Sir John Everett Millais) of a pale child gazing wistfully at a bubble. The company then engraved a bar of Pears soap into the scene, and thereby transformed high art into a universally recognized advertising logo: “Bubbles.”2 In a similar vein, the earliest commercial images of the multinational Liebig Company, a beef bullion manufacturer that pioneered illustrated trade cards, initially used classical motifs of cherubic children in the late 1870s and early 1880s.3 Around the mid-1880s, however, British advertisers began to turn to different motifs that were less traditional and more spectacular. For products ranging from soap to tea to cocoa, British advertisers turned to the empire for inspiration, presenting illustrations of savage dervishes in the Sudan genufl ecting in awe at British soap slogans, or depicting half-naked primitives puzzling over the latest modern manufactures.
