LONDON – My old dad used to swear by his copy of “Pears Cyclopaedia.” Whenever I asked him a question he couldn’t answer, he’d direct me to the little scarlet-bound book and assure me it was among its pages that I’d find what I was looking for. He was often right: with its ‘Twenty-two Complete Works of Reference in one Handy Volume of nearly 1,000 Pages’ – it has everything from an atlas to a dictionary of wireless – what wasn’t in there wasn’t worth knowing. It remains on my bookshelf, despite Google.

More importantly, though, the Pears volume introduced me to my first artwork: “Bubbles,” the painting by the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John Everett Millais. With the subtle addition of a bar of the transparent soap, the portrait became and still is one of the most instantly recognizable advertising symbols ever devised.

When he painted what was originally titled “Child’s World,” Millais was being serious. Using his curly golden-haired five-year-old grandson, William Milbourne James, as his model, the artist was emulating the life-is-short transient symbolism of the Dutch old masters.

Bubbles, by nature, burst in an instant. To the left of the seated boy is a broken plant pot, emblematic of death, in contrast to the strong, green young plant growing to the right. Such symbolism was appreciated by artlovers when the painting went on show for the first time in 1886 but probably was lost on masses encouraged by it to add a particular brand of soap to the weekly shopping list.

Millais, one of Britain’s most popular and wealthy artists, was not best pleased either, but having sold the copyright in the image when he agreed it could be reproduced in the “Illustrated London News,” who then sold it to Pears, his hands were tied. The art world was not impressed either. Millais was forced to defend his actions, while the debate about the ethics of using art as advertising raged in the letters column of The Times even after Millais’ death.

For Pears, however, it was a triumph. “Bubbles” became the first in a long run of similar adverts, and business boomed. This was just as well, for the business founded in London in 1789 by Andrew Pears, a barber from Cornwall, and his grandson Francis, who joined the firm in 1835, was previously in danger of stagnating.

The turning point was a new factory in Middlesex, run by Francis’s son Andrew, and a new partner, Thomas J. Barratt (1842-1914), who had married Francis’s eldest daughter. Entrepreneurial, aggressive and resourceful, Barratt revolutionized the business.

Some say he was the father of modern advertising, which might be the case. He was certainly a brilliant ideas man. In one masterstroke he purchased 250,000 French 10 centime coins and had “Pears” stamped on each one, which were then put into circulation in the UK, each worth a penny. Massive publicity followed, until Parliament was forced to pass a law making foreign currency illegal.

Celebrity endorsements were another of his innovations, among them a glowing testimony from actress Lillie Langtry, with her famous ivory complexion, plastered across billboards and newspaper and magazine adverts. In another, he purchased the entire front page of the “New York Times” to promote the testimonial of leading U.S. religious leader Henry Ward Beecher, who was persuaded to say that cleanliness using Pears was next to Godliness.

In the UK, babies whose birth was announced in “The Times” were sent a complimentary bar of the soap, paid for by Barratt; but his most audacious scheme, to purchase advertising space on the National Census form, was rejected by the government, which turned down the offer of £100,000 for the privilege. Had it succeeded, Pears’ name would have been in the hands of 35 million citizens.

The Bubbles campaign was said to have cost Barratt £30,000, but it proved to be an unqualified success. In addition to the image being printed in every copy of the Cyclopaedia, countless numbers of quality chromolithographic prints were published that hang in the homes of collectors to this day (mine included).

Another milestone was laid in 1891, when Barratt introduced the now famous and highly collectible “Pears Annual,” which ran until 1925. A large format art publication, it contained quality fiction — Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books appeared in early editions — Pears advertising (obviously) colored plates and usually two large loose “Presentation Plates” intended to be framed and hung on the wall. It cost 6d (2 pence).

The annual brought high art to the masses. Writing in the 1897 edition, Barratt claimed,“Our ambition has been to offer an appreciative and increasing public, which has grown to expect these advantages at our hands, presentation pictures of superior quality and of artistic values, to ensure our extended popularity, and to constitute Pears Annual the foremost achievement of this kind …”

He continued: “The bonne bouche of ‘Pears Annual 1897’ will be readily recognised in the two large Presentation Plates, after the late and ever-to-be-lamented President of the Royal Academy, Sir John Everett Millais, whose two chefs-d’oeuvre, the well-known pictures, ‘Cherry Ripe’ and ‘Bubbles,’ are now placed within the means of the million for the first time, so beautifully reproduced as scarcely to be distinguishable from the original pictures themselves … which now have a value of more than £10,000 the pair. And whilst so long as Pears Annual is produced it will ever be our aim, so far as it is in our power, to maintain its excellence, we do not expect again to have the opportunity of furnishing you with such a pair of pictures as these — worthy, as they are, of being framed and hung in the first and most artistic houses in the land.”

Truth be told, the quality of the “free” prints was maintained, much to the delight of today’s collectors. So many were printed — and so highly cherished as to be properly framed and glazed — they remain fairly common today. Expect to pay around £80-£120 at a collectors’ fair or auction. Hang them out of the way of sunlight, so they can be appreciated by another generation.

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LONDON – It was a monthly, village-hall auction and we were there on the off chance of picking up a bargain. You know the kind of sale I mean: the auctioneer rents the room on the Friday and all the local dealers take along their junk for the sale the following day. It’s where we caught the collecting bug and where we made some of our best buys.

In the end, it looked like being a blank day and all we finished up buying was a handful of old pictures, useful only for the frames. Or so we thought. There was just one picture that stood out from the rest. It was an embroidery of a sailing ship done in a naive, rough-and-ready but nevertheless clever fashion that transpired to be the work of a 12-year-old boy.

How can you possibly know that? I hear you ask. Simple. The picture needed reframing. When we removed it from its original frame, there on the back was the following inscription written in black ink: “Worked by Algernon R. Baker, aged 12 years. In loving memory from Muzzer.”

Who Muzzer was is anyone’s guess. But mine is that Algernon was a young midshipman who worked the embroidery to while away the hours during a long voyage. Too romantic perhaps, but the embroidery has pride of place in our small collection of pictures without paint. Its cost is hard to say, but we paid £6 for the job lot of frames. Its value to us is immeasurable.

The only other sailor’s woolwork picture we own was altogether more expensive. I spotted it in an online auction, and couldn’t resist having a go. It shows a pilot boat leading a clipper in full sail past a headland with a lighthouse on it — clearly a tricky place for shipping — still in its original frame and in perfect condition. If memory serves, it cost something north of £300 but it’s 10 times the size of Algernon’s effort, although the stitching technique is identical.

None of the so-called pictures without paint is more inventive or fascinating than those made by sailors, who must surely have been subjected to the mind-numbing boredom whiling away the hours on the dog watch. What better way to pass the time than by embroidering a picture of the ship on which you serve?

In fact, some pictures were done in such accurate detail, it is often possible to date and even identify the vessels concerned. Naturally, this has a dramatic affect on values, potentially doubling those of the best.

The pictures are quite obviously the work of a male hand. Usually they were embroidered on sailcloth or some other coarse material stretched over a frame knocked together from any wood that happened to be available. Wool was the most commonly used for the pictures, in a crude longstitch, although in rare examples, cotton and linen are seen.

Highly detailed rigging is another feature, usually in spidery black or brown thread. The same thread is sometimes used to work dates and names into the pictures.

The ship pictures were highly popular between about 1840-1880. Nowadays they are a popular addition to sales of naive and primitive antiques and works of art. Prices vary according to size and detail. Earlier examples tend to be the most expensive, while later, less carefully worked pictures lose their quality and appeal. Expect to pay £400-600 for one worth hanging on the wall; £500-800 for a good one and twice, or even three times that for the exceptional.

One of the most esoteric in this area of collecting are sand pictures, which started life centuries ago as ceremonial or ritualistic exercises intended to be transient and temporary. None were more temporary than those created by the German artist Benjamin Zobel (1762-1831) for his employer, the mad King George III.

Zobel, the son of a German confectioner, became a “table decker,” creating pictures of colored sand, marble dust, powdered glass, sugar and even bread crumbs to replace tablecloths at banquets. The work probably made the Bavarian artist mad too. Each day, just a little more insane, the king would view Zobel’s latest masterpieces and then ruffle them up and make him start all over again.

It was enough to start a craze, albeit a brief one. Bored Regency and Victorian ladies spent hours making sand pictures, not on the tops of tables, but on canvas which they framed and hung on the wall. And before you ask, the sand they used was mixed with glue. That way their work didn’t end up on the floor like Zobel’s.

Sand pictures find a ready market when they turn up in the saleroom, as do other pictures without paint, the list of which is extensive. Perhaps the best known is the cut-out paper portrait, the silhouette, so named after the French Controller General of Finances, Ettienne de Silhouette. The term came to mean “a man reduced to his simplest form” which is just what you were when you paid your taxes.

Other types of paper pictures include elaborate and intricate cut-out designs, not unlike doilies, that first appeared in about 1840. Cut-outs were favoured by artistic young ladies and gentlemen who produced work of the most amazing delicacy. The less artistic, however, chose to make tinsel pictures, mainly because they took less skill and talent.

Colored and shiny paper was cut to form pictures of fruit, flowers and landscapes in the pastime that first became popular towards the end of the 18th century. It had largely died out by about 1850.

Those lacking the ability to create their own pictures probably spent their spare time with one of the many kits available to produce pinprick pictures: basically pictures made from holes. Complete instructions and designs were to be found in books and magazines at the height of their popularity from 1820-1840. Pictures were made using a range of different-sized pins and often also involving the cut-out technique. Other pictures that never saw an artist’s brush were fashioned from all manner of raw materials: seaweed, cork, wax, even human hair.

The First World War was another opportunity for men to try their hands at sewing and embroidery. Traditionally, soldiers had always dabbled with embroidering their regimental badges on to handkerchiefs to send home to sweethearts and the 1914-18 war saw the habit grow into an art form.

Often quite large pictures contained a photograph of the soldier, surrounded by flags of the Allies, laurel leaves, poppies and patriotic inscriptions. The good ones, worked in colored silks, can only appreciate in value, but don’t be fooled by manufactured versions that soldiers who were all thumbs purchased to send home to their loved ones.

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LONDON – Josiah Wedgwood had the right idea: the father of English ceramic manufacturers took home all new prototype designs of his teapots so that his wife could “road test” them for performance and suitability before they went into production. If she approved, he gave the green light and the Etruria machinery rolled.

What she would have made of the so-called ‘Aesthetic’ or ‘Patience’ teapot illustrated here is beyond imagination, but this most famous teapot is one every collector covets. The teapot is far from fit for purpose. It was difficult to fill, even harder to pour without spillage and almost impossible to keep clean, although whether it was ever intended for serious use is open to debate.

Either way, its quirky charm has ensured it a place in ceramic design history … and conservatively, a £3,000-5,000 saleroom price tag for anyone with an empty space in a cabinet of curiosities.

Designed by Richard William Binns, (1819-1900) and modeled by James Hadley, (1838-1903), it was made by Royal Worcester in 1881 as a mockery of the Aesthetic Movement. Its appearance followed the success of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta Patience, first performed that year at the Opera Comique in London.

An inscription on the base which reads: “Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and Evolution of living up to one’s teapot,” is a barbed commentary on how the male and female characters, modeled front and back seemingly share the same amorphous gender.

They wear the “greenery-yallery of the Grosvenor Gallery,” as the operetta puts it, puce hats and fashionable Pre-Raphaelite red hair; and aside from taking a swipe at Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, Oscar Wilde, a champion of the Aesthetic Movement, comes in for some real stick.

While at Magdalen College, Wilde, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the figure on the teapot, wore his hair long, poured scorn on “manly” sports and decorated his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d’art. Entertaining friends lavishly, he famously once remarked: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

The comment passed into literacy history, while the teapot displays all those symbols. The male figure has a sunflower as a buttonhole, while the female has a lily tucked into the waist of her outfit, but it is the limp-wristed pose adopted by the man that, perhaps, hints at a deeper symbolism.

Novelty teapots are not a modern phenomenon. In the 1750s, Staffordshire potters such as Thomas Whieldon were producing teapots shaped like pineapples and cauliflowers, while the Victorians allowed their imagination to run riot. Minton capitalized on the furor caused by Charles Darwin with a teapot in majolica modelled as a monkey.

One of the most valuable Minton teapots, however, is modeled as a vulture attacking a serpent. It was designed for Minton in 1874 by Colonel Henry Hope Crealock. The complexity of the design meant few were made and only a handful has been sold at auction in recent times. The one illustrated here had a repaired handle but still made £17,000.

Crealock was a professional soldier – he served at the siege of Sebastopol, in the Second Opium War and the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879 – and also a skilled draftsman who recorded animals and events during his military service across the world.

The accoutrements of the great British habit of tea-drinking have been collected since the new drink of tee, or tay, or tcha (the derivation of the word char) was introduced in the 17th century. Teapots must surely be the most collectible, and the search for new examples keeps literally thousands of people absorbed, many for a lifetime.

One of the rarest and most important examples to watch out for at the next flea market was made by the Chelsea factory in about 1750-52. It is molded with the leaves of the Asplenium scolopendrium, better known as the hartís-tongue fern. Only one example is known to survive today and is a copy of a French teapot of the same design, produced in the 1740s. Already sold five times at auction, having first appeared in 1941, it has a current saleroom value of £30,000-50,000.

One of the earliest teapots produced in British porcelain was made at the Limehouse factory in London. This was among the first English porcelain production centers, founded in the mid 18th century within a year of Bow and Chelsea. Production was short-lived lasting little more three or four years before it closed in early 1748.

At just 3æ (three and three quarters) inches high, the little blue and white teapot circa 1746-48, illustrated, might easily be overlooked or passed off being intended for a dolls’ tea party. Keep your eyes peeled: it’s worth £20,000-30,000, as is the rare and important Bow teapot, also illustrated, decorated with flowers by James Welsh. Only one other like it is known.

The great thing about collecting teapots is that apart from there being countless different styles and shapes to be unearthed by both well known manufacturers and anonymous ones alike, new designs appear on the market with unnerving regularity.

Once you start collecting, you might never be able to stop, particularly if you share the notion that today’s new production is tomorrow’s collectible. In 100 years’ time, it becomes an antique – officially. Given the prices some might go on to achieve, perhaps we shouldn’t poke fun at the novelty teapots sitting on the shelves at gift shops … whether they pour a good cup of char or not.

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