There are 35 paintings by 20 different artists hanging on the walls of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. This painting, one of the smallest at about 4cm high, is situated in the Night Nursery on the top floor of the house. Little is known about its creator, Cardiff-based painter Alfred Hemming, although it is clearly a miniature copy of John Everett Millais’s famous 1886 painting entitled A Child’s World (“Bubbles”). This original, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, became known in households across the country after being used as the advertising image for the soap brand Pears. 

Although the subject matter probably had a symbolic function in Millais’s original canvas – the bubbles suggesting the transience of life, ready to ‘pop’ and disappear at any moment – by the time a miniature version was included in the Dolls’ House it was probably simply seen as a pleasant image for a child’s nursery, with its cherubic little boy and connotations of cleanliness. Though not his own composition, Hemming prominently signs his tiny copy with ‘ACH’ in the bottom right corner.