Millais, at the back of the Tate

This statue isn't quite as it seems.

John Everett Millais was was a popular English painter and illustrator in the 1800s, and when he died, the production of a memorial was important enough for the future king Edward to be personally involved. This tribute was unveiled in 1905 at the front of what is now Tate Britain, the Pall Mall Gazette praising it as "a breezy statue, representing the man in the characteristic attitude in which we all knew him".

But it seems that he rather went out of favour: by 1953 the Tate Director Sir Norman Reid was trying to move it, calling its presence "positively harmful". The debate rumbled on until the statue was removed to the rear of the building in 2000.

So what at first seemed to me to be a proud and prominent memorial to a leading painter, now seems to be a monument to a forgotten man who has gone out of fashion, tucked away out of sight round the back of the gallery...