This is a past exhibition.

George Frederic Watts is best-known today as a painter – as the portraitist to the nation and the creator of large-scale Symbolist pictures. Despite this reputation from the 1860s until his death in 1904, Watts dedicated significant time to sculpture. Inspired by the fragmentary sculpture collection at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village – all of which was saved from the artist's London and Surrey studios – this exhibition will be the first to explore Watts’s experimental, obsessive, and even destructive ways of working.

Featuring an idiosyncratic assortment of anatomical models, écorché and sculptural studies, the exhibition offers unique insights into Watts’s creative studio practice. Brought together with oils and works on paper, this exhibition will consider how and why the artist moved seamlessly between different materials and across different dimensions. A Fragmented Legacy: G F Watts & Sculpture will illuminate Watts’s innovative and often overlooked work as one of the leading painter-sculptors of the Victorian era.