The Little Mermaid

First the important thing: she is 1.25 metres tall. That is worth saying straight away, because it is what surprises people most, and the disappointment goes away once somebody says it first. The story begins in 1909, at the Royal Danish Theatre. Carl Jacobsen, the brewer behind Carlsberg, sat in the audience watching a ballet of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. He was so taken with what he saw that he walked out and commissioned a statue, and the work went to the sculptor Edvard Eriksen. Eriksen knew who he wanted as his model: Ellen Price, the ballerina who had danced the part. She agreed to meet him, and refused to pose nude. So Eriksen asked his own wife, Eline, and it is her you are looking at. The whole figure is Eline Eriksen. The widespread story that the head is Ellen Price has followed the statue for over a century, and it is not true. She was unveiled on the twenty-third of August 1913, and she has had a rough life since. Her head has been sawn off and stolen twice, in 1964 and in 1998. Her right arm went missing in 1984. In 2003 she was blasted off her base. Through all of it she has been repaired and put back on the same stone, every single time.