Physical Energy: The Victorian Faith in Force

Why is it significant?

Walk up to the base of the huge bronze and look at the rider: naked, twisting in the saddle, shading his eyes and staring into the distance while his horse strains forward beneath him. He carries no sword, no flag, no crown.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk up to the base of the huge bronze and look at the rider: naked, twisting in the saddle, shading his eyes and staring into the distance while his horse strains forward beneath him. He carries no sword, no flag, no crown. The statue is called simply Physical Energy, and it is one of the strangest monuments in any royal park.

Its creator was George Frederic Watts, the most celebrated painter of late Victorian Britain, who turned to sculpture in later life and wrestled with this one figure for about twenty years. He kept reworking the enormous plaster model in his studio and never quite declared it finished. He died in 1904. The bronze in front of you was set up in Kensington Gardens in 1907, and another cast rides on the mountainside above Cape Town, part of the memorial to Cecil Rhodes.

So why does a horseman called Energy belong on a walk about Albert's dream? Because energy was the great new idea of the Victorian age. In the 1840s James Joule, a brewer's son from Salford, churned water with paddles and showed that mechanical work and heat were the same thing in different clothes. Within a few years William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, and the engineer William Rankine had given the word energy its modern scientific meaning... a quantity that is never created or destroyed, only transformed.

Suddenly steam engines, sunlight, muscles and lightning all looked like one power passing from shape to shape. Watts, who painted vast allegories of Hope, Time and Love, wanted a figure for that restless human urge to push on into the unknown. Whether or not you warm to him, he caught the mood of a country that believed it could measure and harness almost anything, and that a nation's museums and colleges were where that harnessing began.

Walk once around the plinth and watch how the horse seems to move as you do; Watts designed it to be seen from every side, out in the open air. Then look south along the avenue. Above the trees, something catches the light like a struck match. That glint is Albert himself, and he is waiting for you with a book on his knee. Head towards it.