Millais - Tate Britain Gallery, London, UK - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

When the painter Millais died in 1896, the Prince of Wales (later to become King Edward VII) chaired a memorial committee, which commissioned a statue of the artist. This was installed at the front of the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain) in the garden on the east side in 1905. On 23 November that year, the Pall Mall Gazette called it "a breezy statue, representing the man in the characteristic attitude in which we all knew him".

In 1953, Tate Director, Sir Norman Reid, attempted to have it replaced by Auguste Rodin's John the Baptist, and in 1962 again proposed its removal, calling its presence "positively harmful". His efforts were frustrated by the statue's owner, the Ministry of Works. Ownership was transferred from the Ministry to English Heritage in 1996, and by them in turn to the Tate. In 2000, under Sir Nicholas Serota's directorship, the statue was removed to the rear of the building.

John Everett Millais:-

A child prodigy in art, John Everett Millais entered the Royal Academy Schools at age 11, and exhibited at the RA from age 17. There he became friends first with Holman Hunt, and afterwards Rossetti, and these three founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Millais quickly moved from a mannerist to a realistic style in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, and was coached by John Ruskin who took him to Scotland to paint in 1853. Millais produced the most well-known portrait of the famous critic in 1854, and incidentally married the wife of Ruskin after the latter's marriage was annulled. (She was the model for the soldier's wife in The Order of Release).
Millais's pictures include Cymon and Iphigenia, Lorenzo and Isabella, his first Pre-Raphaelite image, The Carpenter's Shop (much derided by Charles Dickens), Ferdinand lured by Ariel, Ophelia, with Elizabeth Siddall, later wife of Rossetti, in the title role, and subsequently The Vale of Rest and Autumn Leaves.

He thrived at the Royal Academy, becoming ARA as early as 1853, then RA and finally, in the year of his death, President of the Academy. However, his art became more popular, and he turned to pictures of society ladies, little girls, and fashionable lovers. His St Isumbras at the Ford, showing the knight and two oversweet children on an oversize horse, induced the young Frederick Sandys to draw a famous caricature featuring Millais as the knight, Rossetti and Holman Hunt as the children, and the donkey as John Ruskin.

Millais was also a notable illustrator during the 1860s, and worked much more consistently in this medium than most of the other Pre-Raphaelites. His important illustrations include six for Allingham's The Music Master, 18 for Moxon's Tennyson, two for Willmott's Poets of the 19th Century and 40 in Trollope's Orley Farm. Orley Farm in fact appeared originally in serial form in The Cornhill Magazine, and there are further Millais illustrations in this magazine, in Good Words, in Once a Week and in other periodicals.

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