Physical Energy

Physical Energy is an allegory of the human need for new challenges – of our instinct to always be scanning the horizon, looking towards the future. In the artist's own words, it is 'a symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things'.

Although best known as a painter, G F Watts was also a renowned sculptor. He began work on this gesso grosso plaster model for Physical Energy, in the Sculpture Gallery at the Artists' Village, in 1884 and was still working on it at the time of his death in 1904. In that year the first bronze cast of the work became the artist's last submission to the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. It marked a new prominence for the courtyard of Burlington House as a site for dramatic contemporary sculpture, a role continued today by the Annenberg Courtyard.

The first bronze cast of the model, made in 1902, was exhibited in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in 1904, as part of the annual Summer Exhibition. At the request of the British Government it then travelled to Cape Town to form part of a memorial to the founder of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cecil Rhodes. In 1907, a posthumous cast was made and sited in Kensington Gardens, London, fulfilling the artist's intention to gift the work to the British Government, insisting that it should be 'for the nation' and displayed 'somewhere in London'. A third cast, created in 1959, is situated in the grounds of the National Archives of Zimbabwe in Harare.

A new cast was commissioned by Watts Gallery - Artists' Village in 2017 to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of the artist. The new cast was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts 20 November 2017 - 30 March 2018.