Exhibition curator Dr Stacey Clapperton explores the roots of G F Watts’s obsession with his sculptural practice and destructive way of working.

According to G F Watts, painting, sculpture, and architecture should always work in unison, with the artist looking upon them as one endeavour. He was dismayed by the notion that the next generation of artists were ‘in the habit of keeping exclusively to one branch’.

Although Watts’s artistic practice never saw him roam into the realm of architecture, from the 1860s until his final days in 1904 he dedicated substantial amounts of time to working on sculpture. He was in the truest sense, a painter-sculptor. As the first exhibition of its type, A Fragmented Legacy: G F Watts and Sculpture explores the full breadth of Watts’s experimental, obsessive and even destructive sculptural practice. It highlights the circular way in which the artist’s sculpture would inform his painting, and his painting and drawing would often determine his sculptural compositions.

Watts’s interest in sculpture began early. His youth was spent as an observer in the Soho-based studios of the prominent sculptor William Behnes (1795-1864). Then he enrolled at the Royal Academy School of Art where, at the age of 18, he had access to innumerable plaster casts. Despite these rich environments, it was an Ancient Greek artist who Watts aligned with most when he declared ‘I am a pupil of the greatest sculptor of all, Pheidias’.

Pheidias was the architect and sculptor of the Parthenon Marbles – Greek temple sculptures that were removed without consent by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, from their sacred setting of the Acropolis of Athens, and subsequently sold to the British Museum in 1816. Watts held no other sculptor in higher regard. It was at the British Museum that Watts spent hours upon hours observing the fragments he referred to as ‘the best’ of ‘beauty’. His endless sketches, a rare selection of which will be on display as part of this exhibition, are testaments to his focus and keen observation in detailing a variety of line, texture and form which would inform his painting and sculptural practice throughout his lengthy career.

‘In the best sculpture you feel the palpitations of colour, the elements of a picture; you unconsciously see it painted’, Watts once wrote. It is this vision that will be celebrated throughout the exhibition. By displaying the quickest of pen and pencil sketches alongside expressive chalk studies, in addition to comprehensively detailed oil paintings which will be paired with the polished finished bronzes and at times grotesque preparatory plaster maquettes, it is extraordinary to trace the developments of popular pieces from the Watts Gallery collection, including Love and Life, Clytie, Orpheus and Eurydice and Physical Energy.

The collection at Watts Gallery also contains a number of rather unusual head studies, executed in a three-quarter format. Focusing on extreme states of emotion, these works demonstrate that Watts did not just use sculpture as a means to finalise form or composition, but to experiment with and articulate expression.

From the miniature to the monumental, the exhibition will coincide with a major redisplay of the Sculpture Gallery at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village thanks to the support of the Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation. Specifically built to house and display Watts’s sculpture collection, all of which was saved from the artist’s London and Surrey studios. Our Summer of Sculpture will help piece together the fragments from this extraordinary artistic legacy.

We are grateful to the Exhibition Circle for their support of this exhibition.