Lady Lever’s Sudsy Surprise

Or, On Soap: Advertising and Colonial Erasure at the Lady Lever Art Gallery

Gabrielle Clement, M.A. Art History ’24

Thirty minutes down the River Mersey from Liverpool sits the all-inclusive model community of Port Sunlight Village. Founded in 1888 by “Soap King” William Hesketh Lever (a.k.a. Lord Leverhulme), Port Sunlight Village housed the factory workers, and their families, who manufactured Lever’s claim to fame: individually packaged bars of soap. Port Sunlight Village is regarded as an intact model of the aesthetic and social values platformed by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Complete with a gymnasium, dentist’s office, and dance hall, as well as greenspaces, schools, and ample Tudor revival architecture, Lever hoped his community plan would elevate living standards for both his employees and the working classes of Liverpool at the turn of the century.

At the center of Port Sunlight sits a large concrete neoclassical art gallery that houses Lever’s private collection of fine and decorative art. Constructed in honor of his late wife, Lever opened the Lady Lever Art Gallery in 1922 with the intention that his collection would inspire creativity in the people of Port Sunlight Village and the Liverpool region. Upon arriving at the gallery, I anticipated Lever’s collection would parallel the Progressive Era ideals of education, democratization, and cultivation of taste that were at the foundation of so many public museums in the United States, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.¹ Although the gallery showcased Lever’s primary interest in collecting and exhibiting fine examples of British painting, sculpture, and decorative arts—including a substantial collection of work by pre-Raphaelite artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais—a particular element of Lever’s collecting practice was surprising and sent me down a soapy path of advertising and palm oil to uncover a story about the power of corporate branding and the erasure of colonial histories in fine art museums.

Gallery wing at Lady Lever Art Gallery and museum visitors. Photograph by author.

A major aspect of Lever’s selection was the potential of an artwork to sell a story about sanitation and cleanliness. For Lever, the value of the artwork was not just about the artist, provenance, or the painting’s aesthetic but the advertising value of an image to sell his product, laundry soap. By purchasing the artwork, Lever could then legally reproduce, alter, and sell the image for the benefit of his business. One example of a Lever acquisition-turned-advertisement is an 1893 painting by Royal Academy painter Charles Burton Barber (1845-1894). Originally titled Girls with Dogs, Lever used the artwork to advertise Sunlight Soap in 1901. The advertisement heavily alters the original artwork, replacing the upholstered chair with a washtub. A box of individually wrapped Sunlight soap and two unwrapped pre-cut soap bars are carefully placed near the wash tub. Renamed The Family Wash, the Victorian domestic scene of a young girl playing with puppies transformed into a story about how a family wash day can be made into a pleasant, idealistic afternoon due to Sunlight Soap’s efficient packaging!

The critical role of soap and its advertising has been discussed by scholars of visual culture for a long time. Media scholar Anne McClintock has written extensively about what she terms the “soap cult,” in which the business of soap production and selling is closely aligned to the development of late-nineteenth-century commodity racism, colonial imagery, and general culture of imperialism.² Domestic scenes in advertising, such as The Family Wash, contain rhetoric about purification, civilization, and preservation of the white body from contamination.³

Although not included in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Lever collected objects beyond British or European art with the goal of promotion and public display in mind. Notably, Lever acquired objects made by native people of the Congo and Solomon Islands. By 1906, Lever had begun acquiring land to produce palm oil and other raw materials he needed to manufacture soap. He first incorporated Lever’s Pacific Plantations Ltd. on the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, leasing land from the British government. The cultivation of palm oil is notoriously grueling and dangerous, as well as incredibly ecologically damaging. Labor shortages due to the limited incentive paid to native populations living on the Solomon Islands soon led Lever to exploit land and labor elsewhere. He eventually negotiated with the Belgian government to establish a 2,700,000-acre plantation in the Congo by 1910.⁴

One of the objects Lever acquired from the Solomon Islands was a large wooden feast bowl with shell inlay, likely created by an indigenous Melanesian craftsperson for British collectors of Pacific and Oceanic material. Cultural objects created by the native populations of British colonies, such as the bowl, served specific purposes for Lever. Firstly, it demonstrated evidence of his imperial holdings outside of England. Secondly, it provided Lever with an avenue to craft a narrative about soap, progress, and British civility. Displayed in the Lady Lever Art Gallery around 1911 with other objects from across the Pacific Islands and African continent, the wooden bowl from the Solomon Islands was wrongly categorized as a Pacific washing tub. Another example of Lever’s propensity to alter the original contexts of works to sell his product, the “Pacific washing tub,” now attested that British soap could be sold internationally. Perhaps even, drawing from McClintock’s scholarship, Lever’s display of the “Pacific washing tub” communicated Sunlight Soap’s ability to “clean” and “elevate” Britain’s colonial subjects.⁵

In a contemporary visit to Lady Lever Art Gallery, you won’t find wooden bowls from the Solomon Islands or masks from the Congo. After his death, Lever’s collection of materials from the African continent and the Pacific Islands were dispersed, sold, and separated.⁶ The collection of African materials can no longer be traced, and Lever’s collection of objects from the Solomon Islands, which includes bowls, figurines, and a canoe, were donated to the British Museum in 1927 and 1929. Presently, you can still see this handful of objects Lever collected from the Solomon Islands at the British Museum. Most of these objects are noted as donations from the “Lady Lever Art Gallery.”

What should museum curators do with such objects? If these objects taken by colonial means are set to remain in British collections for the time being, should they be rejoined to Lever’s fraught legacy? Could reconsidering objects that were purposefully separated from their original collecting context help tell a more complete story about soap, palm oil, and British imperialism? To this day, Unilever (the company created from foundations set by William H. Lever) benefits from a story told at Port Sunlight of its charitable and ingenious “Soap King” while the multinational corporation also continues profiting from plantation systems and labor abuse for the palm oil it uses in its products.⁷

Through his manipulation of artworks to advertise his product, we know Lever cared deeply about branding and his company’s public image. The current soap-forward interpretations of Lever’s artworks at the Lady Lever Art Gallery provide unique contextualization of his collection, allowing visitors to think about how a collector valued art and how fine art was dispersed through advertising and more popular means. However, as media history scholars show us, the study of advertising, particularly soap advertising, raises issues about class, race, and empire that must be closely examined. By focusing on Lever as “Soap King,” a proponent of equitable housing, innovator of modern advertising, and collector of British art, we lose the material reality of turn-of-the-century soap production and manufacturing that required foreign labor and colonial systems to function. Fine art, decorative art, visual culture, and separated or missing objects collected by colonial means could all come together in Port Sunlight Village and the Lady Lever Art Gallery to tell an unwashed story about modernization, race, and empire.

1. Jeffrey Trask, “Introduction: Museums and Society,” in Things American, Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 1–12. ↩︎
2. Anne McClintock, “Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising,” in Media Studies: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, and Paul Marris, A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 747–62. ↩︎
3. Although not included in this blog post some soap advertisements, including Sunlight Soap, are wholly direct about the sacrament of soap and racialization. ↩︎
4. Lever had planned to develop this area of Belgian Congo, Lusanga along the Congo River, into a “model colony,” based on the model community of Port Sunlight. To Lever, the exploitation of local people could impact the “improvement of civilization.” He believed that hard labor along with the construction of housing, transportation infrastructure, and recreational facilities could bring prosperity to the region. Due to unstable economic conditions, social housing and other facilities were not built, and Lever Brothers continued to rely on forced labor. For more see, Port Sunlight Village Trust, “Racism, the Belgian Congo, and William Lever,” June 2022, https://www.portsunlightvillage.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/PSVT_Booklet_Racism_the_Belgian_Congo_and_William_Lever_-_V_FINAL_14.06.22.pdf; Andrew West, “The Business of Ethnography: W.H. Lever, Collecting and Colonialism,” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 9 (1997): 101–14. ↩︎
5. West, “The Business of Ethnography: W.H. Lever, Collecting and Colonialism,”110-111. ↩︎
6. In 1921, objects from Africa and the Pacific were removed from public display due to Lever’s failure with his imperial holdings and a price decline of raw materials. West, “The Business of Ethnography: W.H. Lever, Collecting and Colonialism,” 108. ↩︎
7. Margie Mason and Robin McDowell, “Palm Oil Labor Abuses Linked to World’s Top Brands, Banks,” AP News, September 25, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-only-on-ap-indonesia-financial-markets-malaysia-7b634596270cc6a
   a7578a062a30423bb. Accessed 29 February 2024. ↩︎