Full-Scale Gesso Model for 'Physical Energy'

Sculpture Height (Total): 442 cm
Sculpture height: 391 cm
Sculpture width: 410 cm
Sculpture depth: 176 cm

Full-scale gesso grosso model for 'Physical Energy' from which the bronze casts were taken, showing a male nude rider on horseback (inspired by the Parthenon).

G F Watts said that Physical Energy represented 'the restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved'. He intended it to suggest 'man as he ought to be - part of creation, of cosmos in fact, his great limbs.. akin to the rocks and the roots, and his head.. as the sun'.

Watts worked on this model in sections and used gesso grosso, a mixture of plaster, glue and chopped hemp or tow. This allowed it to be modelled when it was soft and carved when it was dry.

Physical Energy exists as four full-size bronze casts in London, Cape Town, Harare and Compton. The gesso model was used to make the casts.

There is also a statuette, a reduction after Physical Energy, which originates in a model made by Thomas Wren in 1914. Wren assisted Watts from 1900 until his death, after which he continued to work for Mary Watts. Either she or the Gallery Trustees asked him to model a reduction after the full-size gesso grosso model. The plan was to make a series for commercial purposes and copies were sold from the Watts Gallery, the Fine Art Society and other outlets. Wren recalls that around fifty were to be cast by Parlanti’s but the outbreak of war curtailed production. Only four casts inscribed ‘Physical Energy, G.F. Watts’ (right side, front) and ‘T.H. Wren 1914’ (right side, rear) have been located to date (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Gibberd Art Gallery, Harlow). Subsequently, casts began to appear without Thomas Wren’s name and the date, including that noted in an inventory of 1928 in the Liverpool University Gallery and another (now lost), acquired by the Fogg Art Museum in 1929.