Gigantic plaster horse returns to restored Watts Gallery

A gigantic horse has been shoved, dragged and cajoled back into its newly-restored home, where it is hoped that it will be safe for at least another century. Weighing in at 3.5 tons of Edwardian plaster, the horse is the maquette for a G F Watts sculpture, Physical Energy, which in 1903 was the largest sculpture ever cast in bronze in Britain. Ever since, it has been one of the treasures of the Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford, which was created as a shrine to the memory of the great artist and sculptor, and will be again when it reopens next year after being rescued at the cost of £10m from the point of collapse. Watts, once such a household name that he was referred to in cartoons and newspapers just by his nickname, Signor, was another giant, the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His work was collected by millionaires and royalty, and he was once dubbed "England's Michelangelo". Within a few decades of his death in 1904 his reputation collapsed so completely that his huge allegorical canvases and beautiful portraits could barely be given away, and in the 1930 the Tate dismantled its large gallery paintings he had given to the nation. "All the Victorians, Millais, Burne Jones, suffered the same fate – but Watts had risen higher and fell further," curator Mark Bills said. "I think it was his great high-minded themes that people have had problems with." His reputation has been recovering by inches in recent years. Hope, one of his most famous paintings, was the inspiration for a sermon by Obama's controversial ex-pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, which in turn was cited as a source of inspiration by Obama. His work has also been seen in several major exhibitions - but by then the gallery, tended for the rest of her life by his devoted widow and fellow artist Mary, was in a disastrous state. In bad weather, dozens of buckets caught leaks from the chaos of altered and extended roofs, wall coverings sagged from the damp, and one gallery had to be emptied of its drawings and curling photographs. When Bills moved in with his family, his predecessor Richard Jefferies warned him that getting out of bed in the unheated staff quarters on a winter's morning was like being hit in the face with a shovel. Two years ago a rescue package was finally in place for the Grade I listed Arts and Crafts building, which became runner up in the BBC Restoration series and won a major Heritage Lottery grant. Then, with the gallery emptied and gutted, the long-established family firm of building contractors went bankrupt followed by the collapse of some scaffolding onto the half-finished roof under the weight of snow last winter. "It was a truly desolating moment," Bills said. "The work was probably at the stage when the building looked at its very worst, and suddenly it became an abandoned building site." It took seven months to find more builders, and added a year and an extra million pounds to the bill – of which the gallery has now raised all but £70,000. They hope to reopen by next summer. Many of the paintings which had to be moved out were huge, but the sculptures were on an entirely different scale. The maquette for the statue of Watts' friend Tennyson is five metres tall, and had to be moved out propped on giant air bags, while Physical Energy is built onto a gigantic cheese wedge-shaped base on a small railway truck. Watts liked to awe particularly distinguished visitors by having the giant horse wheeled out into the sun on tracks, but it is believed the last time it left the studio was to mark the Queen's Coronation in 1953. There were real fears that both sculptures might disintegrate if they were moved, but when conservator Patricia Jackson examined the horse she found that, though the concrete floor beneath was collapsing under its weight, the statue itself was in remarkable condition, in need of no more than cleaning and removal of some later plaster. A laporoscope carefully inserted through an old hole proved that the original framework is still in perfect condition, and the plaster dry and clean inside – apart from the evidence that somebody using much cruder equipment had done the same job long before her, and left an ancient Osram light bulb behind in the belly of the horse.