‘The rider has now a new head & thickened torso, but I cannot say yet whether it is for the better or worse. Signor asks me & I cannot speak with authority. “I am so discouraged about it” he says. “I feel as if I could knock it all to pieces”.’
Mary Watts’ diary, Monday June 19th,1893
Physical Energy, began as an idea in the 1870s. The Marquis of Westminster commissioned George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) to create an equestrian sculpture of his ancestor, Hugh Lupus (c.1050–1101), an ally of William the Conqueror. It represented Lupus's power and legacy. The Marquis rejected G F Watts proposal for an allegorical sculpture preferring a traditional equestrian portrait.
G F Watts was determined to create something more ambitious-, where the work represents ideas. Physical Energy embodies human energy and striving itself, not any individual. For over twenty years, Watts refined it. Though the work draws on a traditional form of rider on horse, this was a new manifestation of an equestrian sculpture with a muscular body representing the strength of purpose and the horse as a means of going forward.
Watts worked on the sculpture throughout his life, remodelling the group after the first cast was taken and until his death.
Information recorded in Mary Watts’ diary suggests that the model was in parts when G F Watts died and has to be re-assembled as in preparation for the second casting she writes, addressing G F Watts:
“…I have the arms and the head set in the torso of the Physical Energy, I want counsel from Mr Rivière on this point. You changed much in his back, moved the head two inches further back. There was still that work of which you said ‘Oh, four days more! It was little to ask’.”
The Diary of Mary Watts, 27th July 1904, eds. Desna Greenhow
G F Watts intended Physical Energy as an allegory- not a portrait of anyone, but an embodiment of the human spirit.
For over a century, we didn’t know who Watts based the rider on. Through the research of art historian Angela Bolger it has now been proposed that Domenico Mancini modelled for the final version of Physical Energy. Mancini was an Italian model working in Victorian London from about the 1890s. She was able to identify him through letters and an unpublished history of the Mancini family.
Research is ongoing.