Tate is in the process of acquiring a painting by Beryl Cook for its collection, ending a three-decade institutional cold shoulder towards one of Britain's most popular artists. The development, first reported by the Financial Times, marks a striking reversal: in the 1990s the then director Nicholas Serota made a point of declaring that there would be no Beryl Cooks in the Tate, a dismissal that came to symbolise the art establishment's sniffiness about her work. Cook, the self-taught painter who died in 2008, spent her career painting vibrant, good-humoured scenes of ordinary people enjoying themselves, images that adorned greetings cards, calendars and prints for decades while the museum world looked the other way. In recent years that stance has softened into a full reassessment. A well-received exhibition at The Box in Plymouth earlier this year drew critical praise, and a 2024 Studio Voltaire show paired her with Tom of Finland as two popular artists long ignored by institutions. The rehabilitation has spilled beyond gallery walls. House of Voltaire, Studio Voltaire's retail arm, has installed a mile-long outdoor display of life-size cutouts and large-scale murals based on Cook's best-loved paintings at Bicester Village in Oxfordshire, on view until 25 October, bringing her ample-figured revellers to a designer shopping audience. Tate's move is the clearest institutional signal yet that the hierarchies which once excluded self-taught, popular artists are being redrawn. Which painting the gallery is acquiring has not been disclosed, but the acquisition alone rewrites a thirty-year-old verdict. Cook's rehabilitation has been gathering pace: a major survey at The Box in Plymouth earlier this year drew warm reviews, and a 2024 Studio Voltaire exhibition paired her with Tom of Finland as two popular artists long overlooked by museums. Last summer a five-metre inflatable based on her 1980 painting 'Nude on a Leopard Skin Rug' even led the artist Jeremy Deller's parade celebrating the National Gallery's 250th birthday, carried up Whitehall and launched into a Trafalgar Square fountain.