Watts Gallery

Brief

Watts Gallery is a beautiful and historically important Arts & Crafts gallery set in the Surrey countryside, UK. We were delighted to be appointed to work on one of the gallery’s exhibitions, Christina Rossetti: Vision & Verse, installing a range of pieces either relating to or by the renowned London-born Victorian poet who influenced the Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-19th century. After a competitive tender process, we were chosen to undertake the full transportation and installation of the exhibition, involving loan items from all over the UK.

Solution

Given our regular operations UK-wide, we were able to offer a ‘part load’ service where we could collect works, including paintings, photographs and drawings, from lenders while carrying out other operations, decreasing the overall cost of transporting objects. We packed, transported, stored, and then installed over 30 pieces, some collated in our state-of-the-art fine art facilities in London and others transported directly from their lender on installation day.

Art technicians from our London facility were responsible for installing the exhibition over the course of a day.

Highlights

One of the exhibition’s highlights was the altarpiece painted by Edward Burne-Jones that was lent by All Saints Margaret Street church, London. A two-metre-long and one-metre-high work from the Pre-Raphaelite painter, it was also one of the most complex items to transport and install. The altarpiece had to be kept at a particular humidity and temperature, so we utilised one of our environmentally-controlled vehicles to transport the object. Importantly, all of our fine art transports meet UK Government Indemnity Scheme standards meaning that all museums can trust us to transport objects for them.

The Watts Gallery curators intended the Burne-Jones altarpiece to be installed at the same height at which it is usually displayed in the church, two metres from the ground. Having ensured beforehand that the right equipment would be on-site, our art technicians used ladders and a teletower to raise the altarpiece and hang it securely.

Following a successful installation, we moved the packing crates to the museum’s art store for later use in de-installing the exhibition.