Physical Energy

The original of this sculpture was larger than life-size. Watts modelled the original between 1883 and 1894. The first cast formed part of the Cecil Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town, South Africa. A second is in Kensington Gardens, London. This replica was made in 1914 after the artist’s death by Tom H Wren, an assistant in Watts’ wife’s pottery. Watts said he was trying ‘to create a figure that should suggest man as he ought to be - a part of creation, of cosmos in fact, his great limbs to be akin to the rocks and the roots, and his head to be as the sun’.