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{{Infobox Artwork |
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| image_file=Assistants_and_George_Frederic_Watts_-_Hope_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg |
| image_file=Assistants_and_George_Frederic_Watts_-_Hope_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg |
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| title=''Hope'' |
| title=''Hope'' |
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| alt=blindfolded girl sitting on a giant orange |
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| artist=[[George Frederic Watts]] |
| artist=[[George Frederic Watts]] |
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| year=1886 |
| year={{start date|1886}} |
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| type=[[Oil painting|Oil]] |
| type=[[Oil painting|Oil]] |
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'''''Hope''''' is a [[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolist]] [[oil painting]] by [[George Frederic Watts]], the first two versions of which were completed in 1886. An effort to break with traditional methods of depicting [[Hope (virtue)|Hope]] in response to social, economic and religious changes, it was radically different to previous depictions of the subject. It shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a [[lyre]] which has only a single string remaining. The background of the painting is almost blank, with the only feature visible in the background being a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism which was not traditionally associated with hope, to make the painting's meaning ambiguous to the viewer. While Watts's use of colour in ''Hope'' was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked it. However, it proved popular with the [[Aesthetic Movement]], who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its moral message. [[Platinotype]] reproductions, and later cheap [[carbon copy|carbon copies]], soon began to be sold. |
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Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he had recently committed to donating his most important works to the nation, and felt it would be inappropriate not to include ''Hope'' in this donation. Consequently, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version of ''Hope'' with the intention of selling it. However, on its completion Watts preferred this copy, and thus he sold the original and donated this copy to the [[South Kensington Museum]] (now the Victoria and Albert Museum); thus, this second version is better known than the original. He subsequently painted at least two other versions of ''Hope'' for private sale, as well as a chalk copy which he donated to the [[Missions to Seamen]] in [[Poplar, London|Poplar]]. |
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'''''Hope''''' is a [[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolist]] [[oil painting]] by [[George Frederic Watts]], two versions of which were completed in 1886. The painting was intended to form part of a series of [[allegory|allegorical]] paintings by Watts entitled the "House of Life". In 2016 the version owned by [[Tate Britain]] was on loan to the [[Watts Gallery]] in [[Surrey]], and on display there. |
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As cheap reproductions of ''Hope'', and from 1908 high-quality prints, began to circulate in large quantities, it became a widely popular image. President of the United States [[Theodore Roosevelt]] displayed a copy of the painting at his [[Sagamore Hill (house)|Sagamore Hill]] home, reproductions circulated worldwide, and a 1922 feature film depicted Watts's creation of the painting and an imagined story behind it. However, by this time ''Hope'' was coming to seem outdated and sentimental. Watts was rapidly falling out of fashion, and in 1938 the [[Tate Gallery]] closed their room dedicated to Watts, where ''Hope'' had been displayed. |
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==Description== |
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Despite the decline in Watts's popularity, ''Hope'' continued to be an influential image in later years, and [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] based an influential 1959 sermon, now known as ''Shattered Dreams'', on the theme of Watts's painting. In 1990 the Rev [[Jeremiah Wright]] preached a sermon in Chicago on Watts's ''Hope''. Among the audience was the young [[Barack Obama]], who was deeply moved by the imagery evoked, and in particular Wright's description of the painting as representing "the audacity to hope", which Obama misheard as "the audacity of Hope". Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his [[2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address]], and later at the title of his [[The Audacity of Hope|2006 book]]; he later based his successful [[Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008|2008 presidential campaign]] around the theme of "Hope". |
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The painting by [[George Frederic Watts]] shows a female [[allegorical figure]] of [[Hope]].<ref name="nydailynews.com">{{cite web |ref=harv|date= 27 December 2008|url = http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/12/27/2008-12-27_victorian_painting_by_gf_watts_inspired_.html|title = Victorian painting by G.F. Watts inspired Obama to harp on 'Hope'|publisher = [[Daily News (New York)|New York Daily News]]| accessdate = 12 March 2010 | last=Tumposky| first= Ellen |quote=}}</ref> Hope is traditionally identifiable through the attribute of an anchor, but Watts took a more original approach. In his painting, she is depicted sitting on a globe, blindfolded, clutching a wooden [[lyre]] with only one string left intact. She sits in a hunched position, with her head leaning towards the instrument, perhaps so she can hear the faint music she can make with the sole remaining string. According to Watts, "Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord". The desolate atmosphere is emphasised by Watts's soft brushwork, creating a misty, [[wikt:ethereal|ethereal]] scene, in tones of green, brown and grey. Watts's melancholy depiction of hope was criticised, and [[G. K. Chesterton]] suggested that a better title would be ''Despair''. |
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==Background== |
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Two versions were painted by Watts in 1886, shortly after the death of Watts's adopted daughter Blanche. The first version – now held in a private collection – was exhibited at the [[Grosvenor Gallery]] in 1886 and received so successfully that he painted a second copy.<ref name="wattsgallery">{{cite web |ref=harv|year= 2008 |url = http://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/HopebyGFWatts.html|title = Hope by G. F. Watts|publisher = Watts Gallery| accessdate = 12 March 2010 | last=Watts Gallery| first= |quote=}}</ref> Watts himself preferred the second, softer, version. It omits the star – a symbol of optimism – that appears at the top of the first version. It was exhibited at the [[South Kensington Museum]] (now the [[V&A]]) and at the [[Exposition Universelle (1889)|Exposition Universelle]] in Paris in 1889. Watts refused an offer of 2000 [[Guinea (British coin)|guineas]] for the second version in 1888, and presented it to [[the Tate]] in 1897.<ref name="Hare">{{cite book | last = Hare, William Loftus | authorlink = | title = Watts, 1817–1904|edition= 1907|pages= | publisher = T.C. & E.C. Jack; New York, Frederick A. Stokes| url= http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13477/13477-h/13477-h.htm#image-5}}- Total pages: 20</ref> The version held by the Tate measures {{convert|142.2|cm|in}} by {{convert|111.8|cm|in}}. |
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[[File:George Frederic Watts by George Frederic Watts.jpg|left|thumb|upright|George Frederic Watts c. 1879|alt=elderly bearded man]] |
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[[George Frederic Watts]] was born in 1817, the son of a London musical instrument manufacturer.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=20}} His two brothers died in 1823, and his mother in 1826, giving Watts an obsession with death throughout his life.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=20}} Meanwhile, his father's strict [[evangelical Christianity]] led to Watts developing a deep knowledge of the Bible but a strong dislike of organised religion.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=20}} Watts was apprenticed as a sculptor at the age of 10, and at the age of 16 was proficient enough as an artist to be earning a living at a portrait painter and as a [[cricket]] illustrator.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=22}}{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=21}} At the age of 18 he gained admission to the [[Royal Academy schools]], although he disliked their methods and his attendance was intermittent.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=22}} In 1837 Watts was commissioned by Greek shipping magnate [[Alexander Constantine Ionides]] to copy a portrait of his father by renowned artist [[Samuel Lane]]; Ionides preferred Watts's version to the original and immediately commissioned two more paintings from him, allowing Watts to devote himself full-time to painting.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=23}} |
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In 1843 Watts travelled to Italy where he remained for four years.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=238}} On his return to London he suffered from depression, and painted a number of notably gloomy works. His skills were widely celebrated, and in 1856 he decided to devote himself to portrait painting.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=33}} His portraits were extremely highly regarded,{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=33}} and in 1867 he was elected a [[Royal Academician]], at the time the highest honour available to an artist,{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=238}}{{efn-ua|In Watts's time, honours such as knighthoods were only bestowed on presidents of major institutions, not on even the most well respected artists.{{sfn|Robinson|2007|p=135}} In 1885 serious consideration was given to raising Watts to the peerage; had this happened, he would have been the first artist thus honoured.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=69}} In the same year, he refused the offer of a [[baronetcy]].{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=238}}}} although he rapidly became disillusioned with the culture of the Royal Academy.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=40}} From 1870 onwards he became widely renowned as a painter of allegorical and mythical subjects;{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=238}} by this time, he was one of the most highly regarded artists in the world.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=xi}} In 1881 he added a glass-roofed gallery to his home at [[Little Holland House]], which was open to the public at weekends, further increasing his fame.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=42}} In 1884 a selection of 50 of his works were shown at New York's [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]], believed to have been the first such exhibition by any artist.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=42}} |
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Watts may have been inspired by the pose of the siren in [[Dante Gabriel Rossetti]]'s 1877 painting ''A Sea Spell'', or the sleeping women in [[Albert Joseph Moore]]'s 1882 painting ''[[commons:File:Moore Albert Joseph Dreamers.jpg|Dreamers]]''. Watts may have taken inspiration for the blindfold from the allegorical figure of Fortune in [[Edward Burne-Jones]]'s 1871 painting ''[[commons:File:Edward Burne-Jones - The Wheel of Fortune.jpg|The Wheel of Fortune]]'', which Watts owned. The painting was displayed at the [[Victoria of the United Kingdom#Diamond Jubilee|1897 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition]], alongside other works by Watts including ''Love and Death'', ''The Court of Death'', ''Psyche'', and ''Mount Ararat''. |
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==Subject== |
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==Influence on others== |
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[[File:Georgiana Maria Leicester Lawrence.jpg|right|thumb|upright|''Georgiana Maria Leicester as Hope'', [[Thomas Lawrence]], c. 1811|alt=young woman holding a sprig of leaves]] |
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Traditionally considered by Christians as a [[Theological virtues|theological virtue]] (a virtue associated with the grace of God rather than with work or self-improvement), since antiquity artistic representations of the personification of hope depicted her as a young woman, typically holding a flower or an anchor.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=11}}{{efn-ua|The anchor in some Christian depictions of Hope is a reference to {{Bibleverse|Hebrews|6:19|KJV}}, "Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=11}}}} |
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During Watts's lifetime, the concept of hope had begun to be questioned in European culture.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=11}} A new school of philosophy based on the thinking of [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] was emerging which saw hope as a negative attribute, encouraging humanity to expend their energies on futile efforts.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=11}} The [[Long Depression]] of the 1870s had wrecked the economy and confidence of Britain, and Watts felt that the increasing mechanisation of daily life, and the importance of material prosperity to Britain's increasingly dominant middle class, were making modern life increasingly soulless.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=30}} |
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''Hope'' inspired a scene from a 1922 film of the same name by [[Herbert Blaché]] and [[Lejaren à Hiller]], featuring [[Mary Astor]] as Hope, and an advertisement by [[IBM]] in the 1920s.{{Citation needed|date=April 2010}} It has been suggested as an influence on [[Picasso]]'s early [[Picasso's Blue Period|Blue Period]] paintings, especially the hunched musician in ''[[The Old Guitarist]]''.<ref name="tate.org"/> [[Martin Luther King Jr]] referenced ''Hope'' in his sermon ''Shattered Dreams'' in his collection of sermons, ''Strength to Love.''. [[Nelson Mandela]] reportedly had a print of the painting on the wall of his prison cell on [[Robben Island]].{{Citation needed|date=April 2010}} After Egypt was defeated by Israel during the [[Six-Day War]] the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops.<ref name="tate.org">{{cite web |ref=harv|year= 2004 |url = http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/wherethereslife.htm|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20040911091622/http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/wherethereslife.htm|archivedate=2004-09-11|title = Where there's life there's|publisher = [[Tate]]| accessdate = 12 March 2010 | last=Barlow| first= Paul |quote=}}</ref> |
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[[File:Dorothy Dene.jpg|left|thumb|upright|alt=curly-haired woman|Dorothy Dene in 1885]] |
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The painting was the subject of a lecture by Dr Frederick G. Sampson in [[Richmond, Virginia]], in the late 1980s, who described it as a study in contradictions. The lecture was attended by [[Jeremiah Wright]] and inspired him to give a sermon in 1990 on the subject of Hope – "with her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music and praise God ... To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope ... that's the real word God will have us hear from this passage and from Watt's painting."<ref>[http://www.preachingtoday.com/sermons/sermons/audacityofhope.html Sermon] printed in Preaching Today, 1990.</ref> Having attended the sermon, [[Barack Obama]] later adopted the phrase "audacity of hope" as the title for his [[2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address]], and as the title of his [[The Audacity of Hope|second book]].<ref name="telegraph.co.uk">{{cite web |ref=harv|date= 13 November 2008|url = http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3563194/Barack-Obamas-favourite-painting.html|title = Barack Obama's favourite painting|work = [[The Sunday Telegraph|The Telegraph]]| accessdate = 12 March 2010 | last=Sooke| first= Alastair |quote=}}</ref> |
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In late 1885 Watts's adopted daughter Blanche Clogstoun had just lost her infant daughter Isabel to illness,{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=220}} and Watts himself wrote to a friend that "I see nothing but uncertainty, contention, conflict, beliefs unsettled and nothing established in place of them.<ref name="WyndhamLetter">Letter from Watts to Madeline Wyndham, 8 December 1885, now in the Tate Archives, quoted {{harvnb|Tromans|2011|p=70}}</ref> Watts set out to reimagine the depiction of Hope in a society in which economic decline and environmental deterioration were increasingly leading people to question the notion of progress and the existence of God.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=31}}{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=12}}{{efn-ua|[[G. K. Chesterton]], in his 1904 biography of Watts, attempted to describe the attitudes of artists who felt themselves surrounded by ugliness, in a culture in which what had previously been political and religious certainties had been thrown into turmoil by scientific and social developments. 'The attitude of that age [...] was an attitude of devouring and concentrated interest in things which were, by their own system, impossible or unknowable. Men were, in the main, agnostics: they said, "We do not know"; but not one of them ever ventured to say, "We do not care." In most eras of revolt and question, the sceptics reap something from their scepticism: if a man were a believer in the eighteenth century, there was Heaven; if he were an unbeliever, there was the Hell-Fire Club. But these men restrained themselves more than hermits for a hope that was more than half hopeless, and sacrificed hope itself for a liberty which they would not enjoy; they were rebels without deliverance and saints without reward. There may have been and there was something arid and over-pompous about them: a newer and gayer philosophy may be passing before us and changing many things for the better; but we shall not easily see any nobler race of men. And its supreme and acute difference from most periods of scepticism, from the later Renaissance, from the Restoration and from the hedonism of our own time was this, that when the creeds crumbled and the gods seemed to break up and vanish, it did not fall back, as we do, on things yet more solid and definite, upon art and wine and high finance and industrial efficiency and vices. It fell in love with abstractions and became enamoured of great and desolate words.'{{sfn|Chesterton|1904|p=12}}}} |
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Other artists of the period had already begun to experiment with alternative methods of depicting Hope in art. Some, such as the upcoming young painter [[Evelyn De Morgan]], drew on the imagery of [[Psalm 137]] and its description of exiled musicians refusing to play for their captors.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}} Meanwhile [[Edward Burne-Jones]], an friend of Watts who specialised in painting mythological and allegorical topics, in 1871 completed the [[Modello|cartoon]] for a planned [[stained glass]] window depicting Hope, for St Margaret's Church in [[Hopton-on-Sea]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}}{{efn-ua|Burne-Jones created multiple versions of his ''Hope'' design throughout the rest of his life. Other than the Hopton window itself, significant versions of the work include an 1877 watercolour now in the [[Dunedin Public Art Gallery]], and an 1896 oil painting now in the [[Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}}}} Burne-Jones's design showed Hope upright and defiant in a prison cell, holding a [[Aaron's rod|flowering rod]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}} |
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==References== |
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{{reflist|2}} |
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Watts generally worked on his allegorical paintings on and off over an extended period, but it appears that ''Hope'' was completed relatively quickly. He left no notes himself regarding his creation of the work, but his close friend Emilie Barrington noted that "a beautiful friend of mine", almost certainly [[Dorothy Dene]], modelled for ''Hope'' in 1885.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=16}} (Dorothy Dene, née Ada Alice Pullen, was better known as a model for [[Frederic Leighton]] but is known to have also modelled for Watts in this period. Although the facial features of ''Hope'' are obscured in Watts's painting, her distinctive jawline and hair are both recognisable.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=16}}) By the end of 1885 Watts had settled on the design of the painting.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=17}} |
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==Composition== |
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{{multiple image|caption_align=center|header_align=center | align= right | direction = horizontal | total_width=270 | image2= Edward Burne-Jones Hope (1871).jpg |width2=279|height2=800| alt2=Woman in a prison cell carrying a flowering rod | caption2= ''Hope'' | image1= Luna - Edward Burne-Jones (1870).jpg |width1=536|height1=766| alt1 =Woman with her face hidden, sitting on a globe | caption1= ''Luna''|footer=The composition of Watts's ''Hope'' was strongly influenced by Burne-Jones's ''Luna''. At the time Watts began work on ''Hope'', Burne-Jones had recently completed a popular treatment of the same topic.}} |
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{{Quote|text=Hope sitting on a globe, with bandaged eyes playing on a lyre which has all the strings broken but one out of which poor little tinkle she is trying to get all the music possible, listening with all her might to the little sound—do you like the idea? |source=George Frederic Watts in a letter to his friend Madeline Wyndham, December 1885<ref name="WyndhamLetter" /> }} |
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''Hope'' shows its central character alone, without no other human figures visible and without her traditional fellow virtues, Love (also known as Charity) and Faith.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=12}} She is dressed in [[Classical antiquity|classical]] costume, based on the [[Elgin Marbles]];{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=12}} Nicholas Tromans of Kingston University speculated that her Greek style of clothing was intentionally chosen to evoke the ambivalent nature of hope in Greek mythology over the certainties of Christian tradition.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=12}} Her pose is based on that of [[Michelangelo]]'s ''[[Night (Michelangelo)|Night]]'', in an intentionally strained pose.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=135}} She sits on a small, imperfect orange globe with wisps of cloud around its circumference, against an almost blank mottled blue background.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}}{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}} The figure is illuminated faintly from behind, as if by starlight, and also directly from the front as if the observer themselves is the source of light.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=60}} Watts's use of light and tone avoids the clear definition of shapes, creating a shimmering and dissolving effect more typically associated with [[pastel]] work than with oil painting.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=222}} |
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The design bears close similarities to Burne-Jones's ''Luna'' (painted in watercolour 1870 and in oils {{circa}} 1872–1875), which also shows a female figure in classical drapery on a globe surrounded by clouds.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}} As with many of Watts's works the style of the painting was rooted in the European [[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolist]] movement, but also drew heavily on the [[Venetian school (art)|Venetian school]] of painting.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=39}} Other works which have been suggested as possible influences on ''Hope'' include Burne-Jones's ''The Wheel of Fortune'' (c. 1870),{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}}{{efn-ua|The best known version of ''The Wheel of Fortune'' is the 1883 version now in the [[Musée d'Orsay]], which bears little resemblance to ''Hope''. However, at the time ''Hope'' was painted Watts owned an early sketch, now in the [[Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery]], in which the figure of Fortune is blindfold against a blue background.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}}}} [[Albert Joseph Moore|Albert Moore]]'s ''Beads'' (1875),{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}} [[Dante Gabriel Rossetti]]'s ''[[A Sea–Spell]]'' (1977),{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=13}} and ''The Throne of Saturn'' by [[Elihu Vedder]] (1884).{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}} |
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[[File:Watts – Idle Child of Fancy.jpg|left|thumb|upright|''Idle Child of Fancy''|alt=naked child sitting on a globe holding a bow and arrow]] |
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''Hope'' is also closely related to ''Idle Child of Fancy'', completed by Watts in 1885, which also shows a personification of one of the traditional virtues (in this case Love) sitting on a cloud-shrouded globe. In traditional depictions of the virtues, Love was shown blindfolded while Hope was not; in ''Hope'' and ''Idle Child'' Watts reversed this imagery, depicting Love looking straight ahead and Hope as blind.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}} It is believed to be the first time in European art in which Hope was depicted as blind.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}} |
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The figure of Hope holds a broken [[lyre]], based on an ancient Athenian wood and tortoiseshell lyre then on display in the British Museum.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}}{{efn-ua|British Museum item number 1816,0610.501; the lyre was sold to the museum by [[Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin|Lord Elgin]] in 1816. {{Asof|2016}} the lyre remains on public display.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=463837&partId=1&people=97339&peoA=97339-3-17&page=1|title=Lyre|publisher=The British Museum|accessdate=24 September 2016|location=London}}</ref>}} Although broken musical instruments were a frequently-occurring motif in European art, they had never previously been associated with Hope;{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=14}} since antiquity the unstrung lyre had been considered a symbol of separated lovers and unrequited love.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=15}}{{efn-ua|The use of the unstrung lyre as symbolic of separated lovers dates back at least to the early Roman Empire. [[Petronius]]'s ''[[Satyricon]]'', written in the first century A.D., mentions a visit to an art gallery by the narrator Encolpius in which he sees a painting of Apollo holding an unstrung lyre in tribute to his recently-deceased lover [[Hyacinth (mythology)|Hyacinth]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=15}}}} Hope's lyre has a only a single string remaining, on which she attempts to play.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=15}}{{efn-ua|Playing musical instruments using only a single string had been popularised in the early 19th century by [[Niccolò Paganini]]. It is not certain whether Watts was intentionally aiming to evoke a sense of ostentatious virtuosity in ''Hope''.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=14–15}}}} She strains to listen to the sound of the single unbroken string, symbolising both persistence and fragility, and the closeness of hope and despair.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=135}} Watts had recently shown interest in the idea of a continuity between the visual arts and music, and had previously made use of musical instruments as a way to invigorate the subjects of his portraits.{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=220}} |
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Above the central figure shines a single small star at the very top of the picture, serving as a symbol of further hope beyond that of the central figure herself.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=15–16}} The distance of the star from the central figure and the fact that it is out of her field of view even were she not blindfolded is ambiguous. It provides an uplifting message to the viewer that things are not as bad for the central character as she believes, but also introduces a further element of pathos in that she is unaware of hope existing elsewhere.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=16}} |
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==Reception== |
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[[File:George Frederic Watts by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron.jpg|right|thumb|upright|George Frederic Watts in 1885]] |
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{{Quote|text=Hope's dress is of a dark aërial hue, and her figure is revealed to us by a wan light from the front and the paler light of stars in the sky beyone. This exquisite illumination fuses, so to say, the colours, substance and even the forms and contours of the whole, and suggests a vague, dreamlike magic, the charm of which assorts with the subject, and, as in all great art, imparts grace to the expression of the theme. |source=[[Frederic George Stephens]] on seeing ''Hope'' in Watts's studio, 1886{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}}}} |
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{{quote|text=Deary! a young woman tying herself into a knot and trying to perform the chair-trick. She is balanced on a pantomime Dutch cheese, which is floating in stage muslin of uncertain age and colour. The girl would be none the worse for a warm bath.|source=Satirical magazine ''[[Fun (magazine)|Fun]]'' on the exhibition of ''Hope'', 1886<ref>{{cite journal|date=19 May 1886|title=Quisby and Barkins at the Grosvenor Gallery|journal=Fun|publisher=Gilbert Dalziel|location=London|page=224}}, quoted {{harvnb|Tromans|2011|p=55}}</ref>}} |
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Although the [[Royal Academy Summer Exhibition]] was traditionally the most prestigious venue for English artists to display their new material, Watts chose to exhibit ''Hope'' at the smaller [[Grosvenor Gallery]]. In 1882 the Grosvenor Gallery had staged a [[retrospective exhibition]] of Watts's work and he felt an attachment to the venue.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}} Also, at this time the Grosvenor Gallery was generally more receptive than the Royal Academy to experimentation.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}} ''Hope'' was given the prime spot in the exhibition, in the centre of the gallery's longest wall.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}} |
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Watts's use of colour was an immediate success with critics, with even those who otherwise disliked the piece impressed by Watts's skilful use of colour, tone and harmony. However, its subject and Watts's technique immediately drew criticism from the press.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=20}} ''[[The Times]]'' described it as "one of the most interesting of [Watts's] recent pictures" but observed that while "in point of colour Mr. Watts has seldom given us anything more lovely and delicate ... and there is great beauty in the drawing, though it must be owned that the angles are too many and too marked".<ref>{{Cite newspaper The Times |articlename=The Grosvenor Gallery |day_of_week=Monday |date=3 May 1886 |page_number=7 |issue=31749 |column=A }}</ref> ''The Portfolio''<!-- Don't wikilink unless an article's written, the existing [[Portfolio Magazine]] article is about an unrelated magazine from the 1970s --> praised Watts's ''Repentance of Cain'' but thought ''Hope'' "a poetic but somewhat inferior composition".<ref>{{cite journal|date=April 1886|title=Art Chronicle|journal=The Portfolio|location=London|page=84|url=https://archive.org/stream/portfolioh17hame/portfolioh17hame_djvu.txt|accessdate=24 September 2016}}</ref> [[Theodore Child]] of ''[[The Fortnightly Review]]'' dismissed ''Hope'' as "a ghastly and apocalyptic allegory",<ref name="Child">{{cite journal|last=Child|first=Theodore|date=June 1886|title=Pictures in London and Paris|journal=The Fortnightly Review|publisher=Chapman and Hall|location=London|volume=45|issue=39|page=789}}</ref>{{efn-ua|In the same review, Child described Watts's ''The Soul's Prison'' as a "sinister spider's web of red and green slime".<ref name="Child" />}} while the highly regarded critic [[Claude Phillips]] considered it "an exquisite concept, insufficiently realised by a failed execution".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Phillips|first=Claude|date=July 1886|title=Correspondence d'Angleterre|journal=Gazette des Beaux-Arts|location=Paris|page=76|language=French}}</ref>{{efn-ua|"C'est une pensée exquise, insuffisamment mise en évidence par une exécution défaillante."}} |
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Despite its initial rejection by critics, ''Hope'' proved immediately popular with many in the then-influential [[Aesthetic Movement]], who considered beauty to be the primary purpose of art.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=20}}{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=26}} Watts, who saw art as a medium for moral messages, strongly disliked the doctrine of "art for art's sake";{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=19}} however, the followers of Aestheticism greatly admired Watts's use of colour and symbolism in ''Hope''.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=20–21}} Soon after its exhibition poems based on the image began to be published, while [[platinotype]] reproductions—at the time the photographic process best able to capture subtle variations in tone—became popular.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=21}} (The first platinotype reproductions of ''Hope'' were produced by [[Henry Herschel Hay Cameron]], son of Watts's close friend [[Julia Margaret Cameron]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=21}}) |
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===Religious interpretations=== |
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[[File:Watts – Mammon.jpg|left|thumb|upright|''Hope'' was interpreted by some as a companion to ''Mammon'' (1885).|alt=fat guy sitting on some naked people]] |
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Because ''Hope'' was a painting which was impossible to read using the traditional interpretation of symbolism in painting, Watts intentionally left its meaning ambiguous,{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=223}} and the bleaker interpretations were almost immediately challenged by Christian thinkers following its exhibition. Scottish theologian [[P. T. Forsyth]] felt that ''Hope'' was a companion to Watts's 1885 ''Mammon'' in depicting false gods and the perils awaiting those who attempted to follow them in the absence of faith.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=21}} Forsyth wrote that the image conveyed the absence of faith, illustrated that a loss of faith placed too great a burden on hope alone, and that the message of the painting was that in the godless world created by technology, Hope has intentionally blinded herself and listens only to that music she can make on her own.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=34}} Forsyth's interpretation, that the central figure is not herself a personification of hope but a representation of humanity too horrified at the world it has created to look at it, instead deliberately blinding itself and living in hope, became popular with other theologians.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=34}} |
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Watts's supporters claimed that the image of ''Hope'' had near-miraculous redemptive powers.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=60–61}} In his 1908 work ''Sermons in Art by the Great Masters'', [[Stoke Newington]] Presbyterian minister James Burns wrote of a woman who had been walking to the Thames with the intention of suicide, but had passed the image of ''Hope'' in a shop window and been so inspired by the sight of it that rather than attempting suicide she instead emigrated to Australia.{{sfn|Burns|1908|p=17}} In 1918 Watts's biographer [[Henry William Shrewsbury]] wrote of "a poor girl, character-broken and heart-broken, wandering about the streets of London with a growing feeling that nothing remained but to destroy herself" seeing a photograph of ''Hope'', using the last of her money to buy the photograph, until "looking at it every day, the message sank into her soul, and she fought her way back to a life of purity and honour".{{sfn|Shrewsbury|1918|p=64}} When [[music hall]] star [[Marie Lloyd]] died in 1922 after a life beset with alcohol, illness and depression, it was noted that among her possessions was a print of ''Hope''; one reporter observed that among her other possessions, it looked "like a good deed in a naughty world".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=62}} |
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[[File:Watts – Faith, Hope & Charity.jpg|right|thumb|upright=.9|''Faith, Hope and Charity'' (1900) showed Hope with her lyre restrung, joining forces with Love to restrain Faith.|alt=a woman with a sword is restrained by two other women]] |
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Watts himself was ambivalent when questioned about the religious significance of the image, saying that "I made Hope blind so expecting nothing",{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=34}} although after his death his widow [[Mary Fraser Tytler|Mary Seton Watts]] wrote that the message of the painting was that "Faith must be the companion of Hope. Faith is the substance, the assurance of things hoped for, because it is the evidence of things not seen."{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=34}} Malcolm Warner, curator of the [[Yale Center for British Art]], interpreted the work differently, writing in 1996 that "the quiet sound of the lyre's single string is all that is left of the full music of religious faith; those who still listen are blindfolded in the sense that, even if real reasons for Hope exist, they cannot see them; Hope remains a virtue, but in the age of scientific materialism a weak and ambiguous one".{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=135}} |
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In 1900, shortly before his death, Watts again painted the character of Hope in ''Faith, Hope and Charity'' (now in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin). This shows Hope, smiling and with her lyre restrung, working with Love to persuade a blood-stained Faith to sheath her sword; Tromans writes that "the message would appear to be that if Faith is going to resume her importance for humanity ... it will have to be in a role deferential to the more constant Love and Hope".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=35}} |
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==Second version== |
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By the time ''Hope'' was exhibited, Watts had already committed himself to donate his most significant works to the nation, and although he received multiple offers for the painting he thought it inappropriate not to include ''Hope'' in this donation, in light of the fact that it was already being considered one of his most important pictures.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=21}} In mid-1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a duplicate of the piece, with the intention that this duplicate be donated to the nation allowing him to sell the original.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=21}} Although the composition of this second painting is identical, it is radically different in feel.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=21–22}} The central figure is smaller in relation to the globe, and the colours darker and less sumptuous, giving it an intentionally gloomier feel than the original.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} |
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In late 1886 this second version was one of nine paintings donated to the [[Victoria and Albert Museum|South Kensington Museum]] (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in the first instalment of Watts's gift to the nation.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} Meanwhile, the original was briefly displayed in Nottingham before being sold to [[steam tractor]] entrepreneur [[Joseph Ruston]] in 1887.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} Its whereabouts was long unknown, until it was auctioned at [[Sotheby's]] for £869,000 (about £{{formatnum:{{Inflation|UK|869000|1986|r=-5}}|0}} in {{CURRENTYEAR}} terms{{Inflation-fn|UK}}) in 1986, 100 years after its first exhibition.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=64}} |
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On their donation to the South Kensington Museum the nine works donated by Watts were hung on the staircase leading to the library,{{efn-ua|Not all staff at the South Kensington Museum welcomed Watts's gift; an internal memo of the time commented that "it is very difficult to deal with a man like this who has a very great idea of his own genius and in whom a ''great many'' of the public also believe".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=36}}}} but ''Hope'' proved a popular loan to other institutions as a symbol of current British art. At the [[Royal Jubilee Exhibition]] of 1887 in Manchester, an entire wall was dedicated to the works of Watts. ''Hope'', only recently completed but already the most famous of Watts's works, was placed at the centre of this display.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=9}} It was then exhibited at the 1888 [[Melbourne Centennial Exhibition]] and the 1889 [[Exposition Universelle (1889)|Exposition Universelle]] in Paris, before being moved to Munich for display at the [[Glaspalast (Munich)|Glaspalast]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=49}} In 1897 it was one of the 17 Watts works transferred to the newly-created [[National Gallery of British Art|Tate Gallery]] (commonly known as the Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain);{{sfn|Bills|2011|p=9}} at the time, Watts was so highly regarded that an entire room of the new museum was dedicated to his works.{{sfn|Bills|2011|p=5}} The Tate Gallery considered ''Hope'' one of the highlights of their collection and did not continue the South Kensington Museum's practice of lending the piece to overseas exhibitions.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=37}} |
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{{multiple image|caption_align=center|header_align=center | align= center | direction = horizontal | total_width=650 | image1= Watts-Hope2.jpg |width1=468|height1=623| alt1= blindfolded girl sitting on a giant orange, with a star above her | caption1= First version | image2= Assistants and George Frederic Watts - Hope - Google Art Project.jpg |width2=1738|height2=2193| alt2 = blindfolded girl sitting on a giant orange | caption2= Second version|image3= Watts – Hope (rainbow version).jpg |width3=300|height3=427| alt3 = blindfolded girl surrounded by a rainbow, sitting on a giant orange | caption3= 'Rainbow' version| image4= Watts – Hope (Walker).jpg |width4=734|height4=944| alt4= blindfolded girl sitting on a giant orange, with a star above her | caption4= Oil sketch, 1885| footer=Watts preferred his second version of ''Hope'', which was painted in softer tones. This version was given to the nation on its completion and exhibited worldwide, becoming the best-known version of the image.}} |
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===Other painted versions=== |
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Needing funds to pay for his new house and studio in [[Compton, Surrey]], Watts produced further copies of ''Hope'' for private sale. A small {{convert|66|by|50.8|cm|in|adj=on|abbr=on}} copy was sold to a private collector in Manchester at some point between 1886 and 1890,{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} and was exhibited at the Free Picture Exhibition in [[Canning Town]] (an annual event organised by [[Samuel Barnett (reformer)|Samuel Barnett]] and [[Henrietta Barnett]] in an effort to bring beauty into the lives of the poor{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=23}}) in 1897.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=24}} It is now in the [[Iziko South African National Gallery]], Cape Town.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=28}} Another version, in which Watts included a rainbow surrounding the central figure to reduce the bleakness of the image, was bought by Richard Budgett<!-- Don't wikilink unless he gets an article, the existing article is on someone different -->, a widower whose wife had been a great admirer of Watts,{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} and remained in the possession of the family until 1997.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=66}} In addition, Watts gave his initial [[oil sketch]] to Frederic Leighton; it has been in the collection of the [[Walker Art Gallery]], Liverpool since 1923.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=66}} At least one further version by Watts is believed to have been painted, but its whereabouts is unknown.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} |
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==Legacy== |
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Mark Bills, curator of the [[Watts Gallery]], has described ''Hope'' as "the most famous and influential" of all Watts's paintings and "a jewel of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement",{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=7}} and although Victorian painting styles went out of fashion soon after Watts's death, ''Hope'' has remained extremely influential. In 1889 socialist agitator [[John Burns]] visited Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel, and among their possessions saw a photograph of ''Hope''. After Henrietta Barnett explained its significance to him, efforts were made by the coalition of workers' groups which were to become the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]] to recruit Watts to their cause. Although determined to remain out of politics, Watts wrote in support of striking [[busman|busmen]] in 1891, and in 1895 donated a chalk reproduction of ''Hope'' to the [[Missions to Seamen]] in [[Poplar, London|Poplar]] in support of London dock workers.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=33}} (This is believed to be the red chalk version of ''Hope'' now in the [[Watts Gallery]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=33}}) The passivity of Watts's depiction of Hope drew criticism from some within the socialist movement, who saw her as embodying an unwillingness to commit to action.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=59}} The prominent art critic [[Charles Lewis Hind]] also loathed this passivity, writing in 1902 that "It is not a work that the robust admire, but the solitary and the sad find comfort in it. It reflects the pretty, pitiable, forlorn hope of those who are cursed with a low vitality, and poor physical health".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=60}} |
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[[File:Hollyer – platinotype of Watts's Hope.jpg|right|thumb|upright|Platinotype by Frederick Hollyer|alt=blurry photograph of a blindfolded girl sitting on an orange]] |
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Although Henry Cameron's platinotype reproductions of the first version of ''Hope'' had circulated since the painting's exhibition, they were slow to produce and expensive to buy. In the early 1890s photographer [[Frederick Hollyer]] began to produce large numbers of cheap platinotype reproductions of the second version of ''Hope'',{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=35}} particularly after Hollyer formalised his business relationship with Watts in 1896.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=35–36}} Hollyer sold these reproductions both via [[printsellers]] around the country and directly via catalogue, and the print proved extremely popular.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=36}} |
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===Artistic influence=== |
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[[File:Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896).jpg|left|thumb|''Flaming June'', Frederic Leighton (1895)|alt=sleeping woman dressed in orange]] |
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In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting ''[[Flaming June]]'' on ''Hope'', keeping the central figure's pose but showing her as relaxed and sleeping.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=22}} Dorothy Dene, believed to have been the model for ''Hope'', had worked closely with Leighton since the 1880s, and was left the then huge sum of £10,000 (about £{{formatnum:{{Inflation|UK|10000|1896|r=-5}}|0}} in {{CURRENTYEAR}} terms{{Inflation-fn|UK}}) in Leighton's will.<ref>{{cite news |last=Davies |first=Lucy |newspaper=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |title=Dorothy Dene: Lord Leighton's secret lover? |date=19 November 2014 |url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/11236508/Dorothy-Dene-Lord-Leightons-secret-lover.html |archiveurl= http://www.webcitation.org/6V2BXPYIR |archivedate=23 December 2014 |deadurl=no}}</ref> By this time, ''Hope'' was becoming an icon of English popular culture, propelled by the wide distribution of reproductions;{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=36}} in 1898, a year after the opening of the Tate Gallery, its director noted that ''Hope'' was one of the two most popular works in their collection among students.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=37}}{{efn-ua|The only painting in the Tate collection considered as popular as ''Hope'' among art students was [[Dante Gabriel Rossetti]]'s ''[[Beata Beatrix]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=37}}}} |
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As the 20th century began, the increasingly influential [[modernism|Modernist movement]], which came to dominate British art in the 20th century, drew its inspiration from [[Paul Cézanne]] and had little regard for 19th-century British painting.{{sfn|Warner|1996|p=11}} Watts drew particular dislike from English critics, and ''Hope'' came to be seen as a passing fad, emblematic of the excessive sentimentality and poor taste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=9}}{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=51}} By 1904 author [[E. Nesbit]] used ''Hope'' as a symbol of poor taste in her short story ''The Flying Lodger''<!-- Not 'The New Treasure Seekers'; she repeated the phrase there, but she first used it in 'The Flying Lodger'. -->,{{efn-ua|"All the walls were white plaster, the furniture was white deal—what there was of it, which was precious little. There were no carpets—only white matting. And there was not a single ornament in a single room! There was a clock on the dining-room mantel-piece, but that could not be counted as an ornament because of the useful side of its character. There were only about six pictures—all of a brownish colour. One was the blind girl sitting on an orange with a broken fiddle. It is called Hope."<ref>{{cite ebook|last=Nesbit|first=Edith|authorlink=E. Nesbit|title=Delphi Complete Novels of E. Nesbit|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pUB-AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT432|accessdate=23 September 2016|year=2013|publisher=Delphi Classics|isbn=9781909496873}}</ref>}} describing it as "a blind girl sitting on an orange", a description which would later be popularised by [[Agatha Christie]] in her 1942 novel ''[[Five Little Pigs]]'' (also known as ''Murder in Retrospect'').{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=9}}{{efn-ua|"The walls were distempered an ascetic pale grey, and various reproductions hung upon them. Danté meeting Beatrice on a bridge, and that picture once described by a child as a 'blind girl sitting on an orange and called, I don't know why, Hope'."{{sfn|Christie|1942|p=86}}}} |
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[[File:Old guitarist chicago.jpg|right|thumb|upright|''The Old Guitarist'', Pablo Picasso (1903–04)|alt=blue man hunched over a guitar]] |
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While Watts's work was seen as outdated and sentimental by the English Modernist movement, his experimentation with Symbolism and [[Expressionism]] was beginning to draw respect from the European Modernists, notably the young [[Pablo Picasso]], who reproduced ''Hope's'' intentionally distorted features and broad sweeps of blue in ''[[The Old Guitarist]]'' (1903–1904).{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=40}}<ref name="tate.org">{{cite web |ref=harv|year= 2004 |url = http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/wherethereslife.htm|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20040911091622/http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/wherethereslife.htm|archivedate=2004-09-11|title = Where there's life there's|publisher = [[Tate]]| accessdate = 12 March 2010 | last=Barlow| first= Paul |quote=}}</ref> Despite Watts's fading reputation at home, by the time of his death in 1904 ''Hope'' had become a globally-recognised image. Reproductions circulated in cultures as diverse as Japan, Australia and Poland,{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=49}} and [[Theodore Roosevelt]], President of the United States, displayed a reproduction in his [[Summer White House]] at [[Sagamore Hill (house)|Sagamore Hill]].{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=49}} By 1916, ''Hope'' was well-known enough in the United States that the stage directions for [[Angelina Weld Grimké]]'s ''[[Rachel (play)|Rachel]]'' explicitly use the addition of a copy of ''Hope'' to the set to suggest improvements to the home over the passage of time.{{sfn|Grimké|1920|p=31}}{{efn-ua|''Time:'' October sixteenth, four years later; seven o'clock in the morning. ''Scene:'' The same room. There have been very evident improvements made. The room is not so bare; it is cosier [...] Hanging against the side of the run that faces front is Watts's "Hope".{{sfn|Grimké|1920|p=31}}}} |
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Although it was beginning to be seen as embodying sentimentality and bad taste, ''Hope'' continued to remain popular with the English public. In 1905 ''[[The Strand Magazine]]'' noted that it was the most popular picture in the Tate Gallery, and remarked that "there are few print-sellers who fail to exhibit it in their windows".<ref>{{cite journal|date=January 1905|title=Which Are the Most Popular Pictures? II.—In the Tate Gallery|journal=The Strand Magazine|publisher=George Newnes|location=London}}, reproduced {{harvnb|Tromans|2011|p=37}}</ref> After Watts's death the Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the rights to make [[carbon copy|carbon copies]] of ''Hope'', making reproductions of the image affordable for poorer households,{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=51}} while in 1908 engraver [[Emery Walker]] began to sell full-colour [[photogravure]] prints of ''Hope'', the first publicly available high quality colour reproductions of the image.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=51–52}} |
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In 1922 the American film ''[[Hope (1922 film)|Hope]]'', directed by [[Lejaren Hiller, Sr.|Legaren à Hiller]] and starring [[Mary Astor]] and [[Ralph Faulkner]], was based on the imagined origins of the painting. In it Joan, a fisherman's wife, is treated poorly by the rest of her village in her husband's absence, and has only the hope of his return to cling to. His ship returns but bursts into flames, before he is washed up safe and well on shore. The story is interspersed with scenes of Watts explaining the story to a model, and with stills of the painting.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|pp=54–55}} By the time the film was released, the fad for prints of ''Hope'' was long over, to the extent that references to it had become verbal shorthand for authors and artists wanting to indicate that a scene was set in the 1900s–1910s.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=52}} Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery closed the Watts Room.{{sfn|Bills|2011|p=7}} |
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===Later influence=== |
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[[File:Watts – Hope stamp Jordan 1974 low res.jpg|left|thumb|upright|Jordanian 300 fils stamp, 1974|alt=Postage stamp featuring the "Hope" image and words in English and Arabic]] |
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Despite the steep decline in Watts's popularity, ''Hope'' continued to hold a place in popular culture,{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=220}} and there remained those who considered it a major work. When the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of its Watts holdings in 1954, trade unionist and left-wing M.P. [[Percy Collick]] urged "Labour stalwarts" to attend the exhibition, supposedly privately recounting that he had recently met a Viennese Jewish woman who during "the terrors of the Nazi War" had drawn "renewed faith and hope" from her photograph of ''Hope''.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=59}}{{efn-ua|The truth of this story is unconfirmed. It does not appear in any of Collick's writings, and first appeared in a 1975 biography of Watts by Wilfred Blunt<!-- Don't link unless he gets an article, the existing [[Wilfred Blunt]] is someone unconnected --> based on private conversation between Blunt and Collick.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=59}}}} Meanwhile, an influential 1959 sermon by [[Martin Luther King Jr.]], now known as ''Shattered Dreams'', took ''Hope'' as a symbol of frustrated ambition and the knowledge that few people live to see their wishes fulfilled, arguing that "shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life", and against retreating into either apathetic cynicism, a fatalistic belief in God's will or escapist fantasy in response to failure.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/shattered-dreams|title=Shattered Dreams|last=King|first=Martin Luther|year=1959|publisher=The King Center|accessdate=25 September 2016|location=Atlanta, GA}}</ref> |
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Myths continued to grow about supposed beliefs in the redemptive powers of ''Hope'', and in the 1970s a rumour began to be spread that after Egypt was defeated by Israel during the [[Six-Day War]] the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops.<ref name="tate.org" /> There is no evidence of this ever having taken place, and it is likely to stem from the fact that in early 1974, shortly after the [[Yom Kippur War]] between Israel and Egypt, the image of ''Hope'' was used on Jordanian postage stamps.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=62}}{{efn-ua|The use of ''Hope'' on Jordanian stamps was not a response to military defeat, but had been planned well before the war took place.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=62}} Although a token force of Jordanian troops participated in the Yom Kippur War, their presence was symbolic and there was an agreement between Israel and Jordan that their forces would not engage with each other.<ref>{{cite news|author=Ofer Aderet |title=Jordan and Israel cooperated during Yom Kippur War, documents reveal |newspaper=Haaretz |date=September 12, 2013 |url=http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.546843}}</ref>}} Likewise, it is regularly claimed that [[Nelson Mandela]] kept a print of ''Hope'' in his cell on [[Robben Island]], a claim for which there is no evidence.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=62}} |
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In 1990 [[Barack Obama]], at the time a student at [[Harvard Law School]], attended a sermon at the [[Trinity United Church of Christ]] preached by the Rev [[Jeremiah Wright]].{{sfn|Obama|1995|p=292}}{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=63}}{{efn-ua|Obama's ''Dreams From My Father'' places him as attending this sermon in 1988 before entering Harvard Law School, but Wright's own records show that the sermon was delivered in 1990.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=74}} During the summer of 1990 Obama worked as an [[associate attorney]] at the Chicago firm of [[Hopkins & Sutter]] so was in the city at the time.<ref>{{cite news |author = Aguilar, Louis |date = July 11, 1990 |title = Survey: Law firms slow to add minority partners |newspaper = Chicago Tribune |page = 1 (Business) |url = http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/28774085.html?dids=28774085:28774085&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT |accessdate = June 15, 2008 }}</ref> Obama admits in the preface to ''Dreams From My Father'' that the chronology of events in the book is unreliable.{{sfn|Obama|1995|p=xvii}}}} Taking the [[Books of Samuel]] as a starting point, Wright explained that he had studied Watts's ''Hope'' in the 1950s, and had rediscovered the painting when Dr Frederick G. Sampson delivered a lecture on it in the late 1980s (Sampson described it as "a study in contradictions"), before discussing the image's significance in the modern world.{{sfn|Obama|1995|p=292}}{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=63}} |
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{{quote|text=The painting depicts a harpist, a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits! [...] And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint tones floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope ... she has the audacity ... to make music ... and praise God ... on the one string ... she has left! |
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|source=Jeremiah Wright, 1990, as quoted by Barack Obama, 1995{{sfn|Obama|1995|pp=292–293}}{{efn-ua|Wright's own text of the sermon does not match that recorded by Obama in all aspects. In particular, Obama misremembered Wright's phrase "The Audacity to Hope" as "The Audacity of Hope".{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=74}}}}}} |
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Wright's sermon left a great impression on Obama, who recounted Wright's sermon in detail in his memoir ''[[Dreams from My Father]]''.{{sfn|Obama|1995|pp=292–293}} Soon after ''Dreams From My Father'' was published he entered politics, entering the [[Illinois Senate career of Barack Obama|Illinois Senate]]. In 2004 he was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the [[2004 Democratic National Convention]]. In Obama's 2006 memoir ''[[The Audacity of Hope]]'', he recollects that on being chosen to deliver this speech, he pondered the topics on which he had previously campaigned, and on major issues then affecting the nation, before thinking about the variety of people he had met while campaigning, all endeavouring in different ways to improve their own lives and to serve their country.{{sfn|Obama|2006|p=356}} |
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{{quote|text=It wasn't just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.' had once used in a sermon. The audacity of hope... It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family's story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.|source=Barack Obama, ''The Audacity of Hope'', 2006{{sfn|Obama|2006|p=356}}}} |
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[[File:Barack Obama Hope poster.jpg|right|thumb|upright|''Hope'', Shepard Fairey (2008)|alt=Stylised representation of Barack Obama and the word "Hope"]] |
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[[2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address|Obama's speech]], on the theme of 'The Audacity of Hope', was extremely well-received. Obama was [[United States Senate election in Illinois, 2004|elected to the U.S. Senate]] later that year, and two years later published a second volume of memoirs, also titled ''The Audacity of Hope''. Obama continued to campaign on the theme of "hope", and in his [[Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008|2008 presidential campaign]] his staff requested that artist [[Shepard Fairey]] amend the wording of an independently-produced poster he had created, combining an image of Obama and the word {{smallcaps|progress}}, to instead read {{smallcaps|hope}}.<ref name="Interview">Ben Arnon, "[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster_b_133874.html How the Obama "Hope" Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey]", ''[[Huffington Post]]'', October 13, 2009. Retrieved January 17, 2009.</ref> [[Barack Obama "Hope" poster|The resulting poster]] came to be viewed as the iconic image of Obama's ultimately successful election campaign.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7872253.stm|title=Copyright battle over Obama image|date=5 February 2009|work=[[BBC Online]]|publisher=BBC|accessdate=25 September 2016}}</ref> In light of Obama's well-known interest in Watts's painting, and amid concerns over a perceived dislike of the British, in the last days of [[Brown ministry|Gordon Brown's government]] historian and Labour Party activist [[Tristram Hunt]] proposed that ''Hope'' be transferred to the White House.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/14/obama-inauguration-gordon-brown-gift|title=The perfect gift to soothe Obama's British suspicions|last=Hunt|first=Tristram|date=14 January 2009|work=The Guardian|accessdate=25 September 2016|location=London}}</ref> According to an unverified report in the ''[[Daily Mail]]'', the offer was in fact made but rejected by Obama, who wished to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following controversial remarks made by Wright.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245588/Why-did-Obama-turn-offer-No-10-famous-painting-set-road-White-House.html|title=Why did Obama turn down offer from No 10 for the famous painting that set him on the road to the White House?|last1=Walters|first1=Simon|last2=Lowther|first2=William|date=23 January 2010|work=Daily Mail|accessdate=25 September 2016|location=London}}</ref> |
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''Hope'' remains Watts's best known work,{{sfn|Bills|Bryant|2008|p=220}} and in recognition of its significance, a major redevelopment of the [[Watts Gallery]] completed in 2011 was named the Hope Appeal.{{sfn|Tromans|2011|p=8}}{{sfn|Staley|Underwood|2006|p=70}} |
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{{-}} |
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==Footnotes== |
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{{notelist-ua|30em}} |
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===References=== |
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===Notes=== |
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{{Reflist|colwidth=25em}} |
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===Bibliography=== |
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*{{cite book|last=Bills|first=Mark|title=Painting for the Nation: G. F. Watts at the Tate|year=2011|publisher=Watts Gallery|location=Compton, Surrey|isbn=978-0-9561022-5-6|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last1=Bills|first1=Mark|last2=Bryant|first2=Barbara|title=G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary|year=2008|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven, CT|isbn=978-0-300-15294-4|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Burns|first=James|title=Sermons in Art by the Great Masters|year=1908|publisher=Duckworth|location=London|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Chesterton|first=G. K.|authorlink=G. K. Chesterton|title=G. F. Watts|year=1904|publisher=Duckworth|location=London|oclc=26773336 |ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Christie|first=Agatha|authorlink=Agatha Christie|title=Murder in Retrospect|edition=1985|year=1942|publisher=Bantam Books|location=New York, NY|isbn=9780553350388|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Grimké|first=Angelina W.|authorlink=Angelina Weld Grimké|title=Rachel: A Play in Three Acts|url=https://archive.org/details/rachelplayinthre00grim|year=1920|publisher=The Cornhill Company|location=Boston|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Obama|first=Barack|authorlink=Barack Obama|title=Dreams From My Father|edition=2008 UK|year=1995|publisher=Canongate Books|location=Edinburgh|isbn=978-1-84767-094-6|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Obama|first=Barack|authorlink=Barack Obama|title=The Audacity of Hope|edition=2007 UK|year=2006|publisher=Canongate Books|location=Edinburgh|isbn=978-1-84767-083-0|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Robinson|first=Leonard|title=William Etty: The Life and Art|year=2007|publisher=McFarland & Company|location=Jefferson, NC|isbn=978-0-7864-2531-0|oclc=751047871|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Shrewsbury|first=Henry William|title=The Visions of an Artist: Studies in G. F. Watts, R. A., O. M.; with Verse Interpretations|year=1918|publisher=Charles H. Kelly|location=London|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last1=Staley|first1=Allen|last2=Underwood|first2=Hilary|title=Painting the Cosmos: Landscapes by G. F. Watts|year=2006|publisher=Watts Gallery|location=Compton, Surrey|isbn=0-9548230-5-2|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Tromans|first=Nicholas|title=Hope: The Life and Times of a Victorian Icon|year=2011|publisher=Watts Gallery|location=Compton, Surrey|isbn=978-0-9561022-7-0|ref=harv}} |
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*{{cite book|last=Warner|first=Malcolm|authorlink=Malcolm Warner|title=The Victorians: British Painting 1837–1901|year=1996|publisher=National Gallery of Art|location=Washington, D.C.|isbn=978-0-8109-6342-9|oclc=59600277|ref=harv}} |
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==External links== |
==External links== |
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*[http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/tate/hope-56 "Hope" in high resolution with interpretations and video] from the [[Google Art Project]] |
*[http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/tate/hope-56 "Hope" in high resolution with interpretations and video] from the [[Google Art Project]] |
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Hope (Painting)}} |
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[[Category:Symbolist paintings]] |
[[Category:Symbolist paintings]] |
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[[Category:1886 paintings]] |
[[Category:1886 paintings]] |
Revision as of 22:10, 25 September 2016
Hope | |
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Artist | George Frederic Watts |
Year | 1886 |
Type | Oil |
Dimensions | 142.2 cm × 111.8 cm (56.0 in × 44.0 in) |
Location | Tate Britain |
Hope is a Symbolist oil painting by George Frederic Watts, the first two versions of which were completed in 1886. An effort to break with traditional methods of depicting Hope in response to social, economic and religious changes, it was radically different to previous depictions of the subject. It shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre which has only a single string remaining. The background of the painting is almost blank, with the only feature visible in the background being a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism which was not traditionally associated with hope, to make the painting's meaning ambiguous to the viewer. While Watts's use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked it. However, it proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its moral message. Platinotype reproductions, and later cheap carbon copies, soon began to be sold.
Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he had recently committed to donating his most important works to the nation, and felt it would be inappropriate not to include Hope in this donation. Consequently, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version of Hope with the intention of selling it. However, on its completion Watts preferred this copy, and thus he sold the original and donated this copy to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum); thus, this second version is better known than the original. He subsequently painted at least two other versions of Hope for private sale, as well as a chalk copy which he donated to the Missions to Seamen in Poplar.
As cheap reproductions of Hope, and from 1908 high-quality prints, began to circulate in large quantities, it became a widely popular image. President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt displayed a copy of the painting at his Sagamore Hill home, reproductions circulated worldwide, and a 1922 feature film depicted Watts's creation of the painting and an imagined story behind it. However, by this time Hope was coming to seem outdated and sentimental. Watts was rapidly falling out of fashion, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery closed their room dedicated to Watts, where Hope had been displayed.
Despite the decline in Watts's popularity, Hope continued to be an influential image in later years, and Martin Luther King Jr. based an influential 1959 sermon, now known as Shattered Dreams, on the theme of Watts's painting. In 1990 the Rev Jeremiah Wright preached a sermon in Chicago on Watts's Hope. Among the audience was the young Barack Obama, who was deeply moved by the imagery evoked, and in particular Wright's description of the painting as representing "the audacity to hope", which Obama misheard as "the audacity of Hope". Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and later at the title of his 2006 book; he later based his successful 2008 presidential campaign around the theme of "Hope".
Background
George Frederic Watts was born in 1817, the son of a London musical instrument manufacturer.[1] His two brothers died in 1823, and his mother in 1826, giving Watts an obsession with death throughout his life.[1] Meanwhile, his father's strict evangelical Christianity led to Watts developing a deep knowledge of the Bible but a strong dislike of organised religion.[1] Watts was apprenticed as a sculptor at the age of 10, and at the age of 16 was proficient enough as an artist to be earning a living at a portrait painter and as a cricket illustrator.[2][3] At the age of 18 he gained admission to the Royal Academy schools, although he disliked their methods and his attendance was intermittent.[2] In 1837 Watts was commissioned by Greek shipping magnate Alexander Constantine Ionides to copy a portrait of his father by renowned artist Samuel Lane; Ionides preferred Watts's version to the original and immediately commissioned two more paintings from him, allowing Watts to devote himself full-time to painting.[4]
In 1843 Watts travelled to Italy where he remained for four years.[5] On his return to London he suffered from depression, and painted a number of notably gloomy works. His skills were widely celebrated, and in 1856 he decided to devote himself to portrait painting.[6] His portraits were extremely highly regarded,[6] and in 1867 he was elected a Royal Academician, at the time the highest honour available to an artist,[5][A] although he rapidly became disillusioned with the culture of the Royal Academy.[9] From 1870 onwards he became widely renowned as a painter of allegorical and mythical subjects;[5] by this time, he was one of the most highly regarded artists in the world.[10] In 1881 he added a glass-roofed gallery to his home at Little Holland House, which was open to the public at weekends, further increasing his fame.[11] In 1884 a selection of 50 of his works were shown at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, believed to have been the first such exhibition by any artist.[11]
Subject
Traditionally considered by Christians as a theological virtue (a virtue associated with the grace of God rather than with work or self-improvement), since antiquity artistic representations of the personification of hope depicted her as a young woman, typically holding a flower or an anchor.[12][B]
During Watts's lifetime, the concept of hope had begun to be questioned in European culture.[12] A new school of philosophy based on the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche was emerging which saw hope as a negative attribute, encouraging humanity to expend their energies on futile efforts.[12] The Long Depression of the 1870s had wrecked the economy and confidence of Britain, and Watts felt that the increasing mechanisation of daily life, and the importance of material prosperity to Britain's increasingly dominant middle class, were making modern life increasingly soulless.[13]
In late 1885 Watts's adopted daughter Blanche Clogstoun had just lost her infant daughter Isabel to illness,[14] and Watts himself wrote to a friend that "I see nothing but uncertainty, contention, conflict, beliefs unsettled and nothing established in place of them.[15] Watts set out to reimagine the depiction of Hope in a society in which economic decline and environmental deterioration were increasingly leading people to question the notion of progress and the existence of God.[16][17][C]
Other artists of the period had already begun to experiment with alternative methods of depicting Hope in art. Some, such as the upcoming young painter Evelyn De Morgan, drew on the imagery of Psalm 137 and its description of exiled musicians refusing to play for their captors.[19] Meanwhile Edward Burne-Jones, an friend of Watts who specialised in painting mythological and allegorical topics, in 1871 completed the cartoon for a planned stained glass window depicting Hope, for St Margaret's Church in Hopton-on-Sea.[19][D] Burne-Jones's design showed Hope upright and defiant in a prison cell, holding a flowering rod.[19]
Watts generally worked on his allegorical paintings on and off over an extended period, but it appears that Hope was completed relatively quickly. He left no notes himself regarding his creation of the work, but his close friend Emilie Barrington noted that "a beautiful friend of mine", almost certainly Dorothy Dene, modelled for Hope in 1885.[20] (Dorothy Dene, née Ada Alice Pullen, was better known as a model for Frederic Leighton but is known to have also modelled for Watts in this period. Although the facial features of Hope are obscured in Watts's painting, her distinctive jawline and hair are both recognisable.[20]) By the end of 1885 Watts had settled on the design of the painting.[21]
Composition
Hope sitting on a globe, with bandaged eyes playing on a lyre which has all the strings broken but one out of which poor little tinkle she is trying to get all the music possible, listening with all her might to the little sound—do you like the idea?
— George Frederic Watts in a letter to his friend Madeline Wyndham, December 1885[15]
Hope shows its central character alone, without no other human figures visible and without her traditional fellow virtues, Love (also known as Charity) and Faith.[17] She is dressed in classical costume, based on the Elgin Marbles;[17] Nicholas Tromans of Kingston University speculated that her Greek style of clothing was intentionally chosen to evoke the ambivalent nature of hope in Greek mythology over the certainties of Christian tradition.[17] Her pose is based on that of Michelangelo's Night, in an intentionally strained pose.[22] She sits on a small, imperfect orange globe with wisps of cloud around its circumference, against an almost blank mottled blue background.[19][23] The figure is illuminated faintly from behind, as if by starlight, and also directly from the front as if the observer themselves is the source of light.[24] Watts's use of light and tone avoids the clear definition of shapes, creating a shimmering and dissolving effect more typically associated with pastel work than with oil painting.[25]
The design bears close similarities to Burne-Jones's Luna (painted in watercolour 1870 and in oils c. 1872–1875), which also shows a female figure in classical drapery on a globe surrounded by clouds.[19] As with many of Watts's works the style of the painting was rooted in the European Symbolist movement, but also drew heavily on the Venetian school of painting.[26] Other works which have been suggested as possible influences on Hope include Burne-Jones's The Wheel of Fortune (c. 1870),[27][E] Albert Moore's Beads (1875),[27] Dante Gabriel Rossetti's A Sea–Spell (1977),[19] and The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder (1884).[27]
Hope is also closely related to Idle Child of Fancy, completed by Watts in 1885, which also shows a personification of one of the traditional virtues (in this case Love) sitting on a cloud-shrouded globe. In traditional depictions of the virtues, Love was shown blindfolded while Hope was not; in Hope and Idle Child Watts reversed this imagery, depicting Love looking straight ahead and Hope as blind.[27] It is believed to be the first time in European art in which Hope was depicted as blind.[27]
The figure of Hope holds a broken lyre, based on an ancient Athenian wood and tortoiseshell lyre then on display in the British Museum.[27][F] Although broken musical instruments were a frequently-occurring motif in European art, they had never previously been associated with Hope;[27] since antiquity the unstrung lyre had been considered a symbol of separated lovers and unrequited love.[29][G] Hope's lyre has a only a single string remaining, on which she attempts to play.[29][H] She strains to listen to the sound of the single unbroken string, symbolising both persistence and fragility, and the closeness of hope and despair.[22] Watts had recently shown interest in the idea of a continuity between the visual arts and music, and had previously made use of musical instruments as a way to invigorate the subjects of his portraits.[14]
Above the central figure shines a single small star at the very top of the picture, serving as a symbol of further hope beyond that of the central figure herself.[31] The distance of the star from the central figure and the fact that it is out of her field of view even were she not blindfolded is ambiguous. It provides an uplifting message to the viewer that things are not as bad for the central character as she believes, but also introduces a further element of pathos in that she is unaware of hope existing elsewhere.[20]
Reception
Hope's dress is of a dark aërial hue, and her figure is revealed to us by a wan light from the front and the paler light of stars in the sky beyone. This exquisite illumination fuses, so to say, the colours, substance and even the forms and contours of the whole, and suggests a vague, dreamlike magic, the charm of which assorts with the subject, and, as in all great art, imparts grace to the expression of the theme.
— Frederic George Stephens on seeing Hope in Watts's studio, 1886[23]
Deary! a young woman tying herself into a knot and trying to perform the chair-trick. She is balanced on a pantomime Dutch cheese, which is floating in stage muslin of uncertain age and colour. The girl would be none the worse for a warm bath.
Although the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was traditionally the most prestigious venue for English artists to display their new material, Watts chose to exhibit Hope at the smaller Grosvenor Gallery. In 1882 the Grosvenor Gallery had staged a retrospective exhibition of Watts's work and he felt an attachment to the venue.[23] Also, at this time the Grosvenor Gallery was generally more receptive than the Royal Academy to experimentation.[23] Hope was given the prime spot in the exhibition, in the centre of the gallery's longest wall.[23]
Watts's use of colour was an immediate success with critics, with even those who otherwise disliked the piece impressed by Watts's skilful use of colour, tone and harmony. However, its subject and Watts's technique immediately drew criticism from the press.[33] The Times described it as "one of the most interesting of [Watts's] recent pictures" but observed that while "in point of colour Mr. Watts has seldom given us anything more lovely and delicate ... and there is great beauty in the drawing, though it must be owned that the angles are too many and too marked".[34] The Portfolio praised Watts's Repentance of Cain but thought Hope "a poetic but somewhat inferior composition".[35] Theodore Child of The Fortnightly Review dismissed Hope as "a ghastly and apocalyptic allegory",[36][I] while the highly regarded critic Claude Phillips considered it "an exquisite concept, insufficiently realised by a failed execution".[37][J]
Despite its initial rejection by critics, Hope proved immediately popular with many in the then-influential Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty to be the primary purpose of art.[33][38] Watts, who saw art as a medium for moral messages, strongly disliked the doctrine of "art for art's sake";[23] however, the followers of Aestheticism greatly admired Watts's use of colour and symbolism in Hope.[39] Soon after its exhibition poems based on the image began to be published, while platinotype reproductions—at the time the photographic process best able to capture subtle variations in tone—became popular.[40] (The first platinotype reproductions of Hope were produced by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, son of Watts's close friend Julia Margaret Cameron.[40])
Religious interpretations
Because Hope was a painting which was impossible to read using the traditional interpretation of symbolism in painting, Watts intentionally left its meaning ambiguous,[41] and the bleaker interpretations were almost immediately challenged by Christian thinkers following its exhibition. Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth felt that Hope was a companion to Watts's 1885 Mammon in depicting false gods and the perils awaiting those who attempted to follow them in the absence of faith.[40] Forsyth wrote that the image conveyed the absence of faith, illustrated that a loss of faith placed too great a burden on hope alone, and that the message of the painting was that in the godless world created by technology, Hope has intentionally blinded herself and listens only to that music she can make on her own.[42] Forsyth's interpretation, that the central figure is not herself a personification of hope but a representation of humanity too horrified at the world it has created to look at it, instead deliberately blinding itself and living in hope, became popular with other theologians.[42]
Watts's supporters claimed that the image of Hope had near-miraculous redemptive powers.[43] In his 1908 work Sermons in Art by the Great Masters, Stoke Newington Presbyterian minister James Burns wrote of a woman who had been walking to the Thames with the intention of suicide, but had passed the image of Hope in a shop window and been so inspired by the sight of it that rather than attempting suicide she instead emigrated to Australia.[44] In 1918 Watts's biographer Henry William Shrewsbury wrote of "a poor girl, character-broken and heart-broken, wandering about the streets of London with a growing feeling that nothing remained but to destroy herself" seeing a photograph of Hope, using the last of her money to buy the photograph, until "looking at it every day, the message sank into her soul, and she fought her way back to a life of purity and honour".[45] When music hall star Marie Lloyd died in 1922 after a life beset with alcohol, illness and depression, it was noted that among her possessions was a print of Hope; one reporter observed that among her other possessions, it looked "like a good deed in a naughty world".[46]
Watts himself was ambivalent when questioned about the religious significance of the image, saying that "I made Hope blind so expecting nothing",[42] although after his death his widow Mary Seton Watts wrote that the message of the painting was that "Faith must be the companion of Hope. Faith is the substance, the assurance of things hoped for, because it is the evidence of things not seen."[42] Malcolm Warner, curator of the Yale Center for British Art, interpreted the work differently, writing in 1996 that "the quiet sound of the lyre's single string is all that is left of the full music of religious faith; those who still listen are blindfolded in the sense that, even if real reasons for Hope exist, they cannot see them; Hope remains a virtue, but in the age of scientific materialism a weak and ambiguous one".[22]
In 1900, shortly before his death, Watts again painted the character of Hope in Faith, Hope and Charity (now in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin). This shows Hope, smiling and with her lyre restrung, working with Love to persuade a blood-stained Faith to sheath her sword; Tromans writes that "the message would appear to be that if Faith is going to resume her importance for humanity ... it will have to be in a role deferential to the more constant Love and Hope".[47]
Second version
By the time Hope was exhibited, Watts had already committed himself to donate his most significant works to the nation, and although he received multiple offers for the painting he thought it inappropriate not to include Hope in this donation, in light of the fact that it was already being considered one of his most important pictures.[40] In mid-1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a duplicate of the piece, with the intention that this duplicate be donated to the nation allowing him to sell the original.[40] Although the composition of this second painting is identical, it is radically different in feel.[48] The central figure is smaller in relation to the globe, and the colours darker and less sumptuous, giving it an intentionally gloomier feel than the original.[49]
In late 1886 this second version was one of nine paintings donated to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in the first instalment of Watts's gift to the nation.[49] Meanwhile, the original was briefly displayed in Nottingham before being sold to steam tractor entrepreneur Joseph Ruston in 1887.[49] Its whereabouts was long unknown, until it was auctioned at Sotheby's for £869,000 (about £3,200,000 in 2024 terms[50]) in 1986, 100 years after its first exhibition.[51]
On their donation to the South Kensington Museum the nine works donated by Watts were hung on the staircase leading to the library,[K] but Hope proved a popular loan to other institutions as a symbol of current British art. At the Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 in Manchester, an entire wall was dedicated to the works of Watts. Hope, only recently completed but already the most famous of Watts's works, was placed at the centre of this display.[53] It was then exhibited at the 1888 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition and the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, before being moved to Munich for display at the Glaspalast.[54] In 1897 it was one of the 17 Watts works transferred to the newly-created Tate Gallery (commonly known as the Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain);[55] at the time, Watts was so highly regarded that an entire room of the new museum was dedicated to his works.[56] The Tate Gallery considered Hope one of the highlights of their collection and did not continue the South Kensington Museum's practice of lending the piece to overseas exhibitions.[57]
Other painted versions
Needing funds to pay for his new house and studio in Compton, Surrey, Watts produced further copies of Hope for private sale. A small 66 by 50.8 cm (26.0 by 20.0 in) copy was sold to a private collector in Manchester at some point between 1886 and 1890,[49] and was exhibited at the Free Picture Exhibition in Canning Town (an annual event organised by Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett in an effort to bring beauty into the lives of the poor[58]) in 1897.[59] It is now in the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.[60] Another version, in which Watts included a rainbow surrounding the central figure to reduce the bleakness of the image, was bought by Richard Budgett, a widower whose wife had been a great admirer of Watts,[49] and remained in the possession of the family until 1997.[61] In addition, Watts gave his initial oil sketch to Frederic Leighton; it has been in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool since 1923.[61] At least one further version by Watts is believed to have been painted, but its whereabouts is unknown.[49]
Legacy
Mark Bills, curator of the Watts Gallery, has described Hope as "the most famous and influential" of all Watts's paintings and "a jewel of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement",[62] and although Victorian painting styles went out of fashion soon after Watts's death, Hope has remained extremely influential. In 1889 socialist agitator John Burns visited Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel, and among their possessions saw a photograph of Hope. After Henrietta Barnett explained its significance to him, efforts were made by the coalition of workers' groups which were to become the Labour Party to recruit Watts to their cause. Although determined to remain out of politics, Watts wrote in support of striking busmen in 1891, and in 1895 donated a chalk reproduction of Hope to the Missions to Seamen in Poplar in support of London dock workers.[63] (This is believed to be the red chalk version of Hope now in the Watts Gallery.[63]) The passivity of Watts's depiction of Hope drew criticism from some within the socialist movement, who saw her as embodying an unwillingness to commit to action.[64] The prominent art critic Charles Lewis Hind also loathed this passivity, writing in 1902 that "It is not a work that the robust admire, but the solitary and the sad find comfort in it. It reflects the pretty, pitiable, forlorn hope of those who are cursed with a low vitality, and poor physical health".[24]
Although Henry Cameron's platinotype reproductions of the first version of Hope had circulated since the painting's exhibition, they were slow to produce and expensive to buy. In the early 1890s photographer Frederick Hollyer began to produce large numbers of cheap platinotype reproductions of the second version of Hope,[47] particularly after Hollyer formalised his business relationship with Watts in 1896.[65] Hollyer sold these reproductions both via printsellers around the country and directly via catalogue, and the print proved extremely popular.[52]
Artistic influence
In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting Flaming June on Hope, keeping the central figure's pose but showing her as relaxed and sleeping.[49] Dorothy Dene, believed to have been the model for Hope, had worked closely with Leighton since the 1880s, and was left the then huge sum of £10,000 (about £1,500,000 in 2024 terms[50]) in Leighton's will.[66] By this time, Hope was becoming an icon of English popular culture, propelled by the wide distribution of reproductions;[52] in 1898, a year after the opening of the Tate Gallery, its director noted that Hope was one of the two most popular works in their collection among students.[57][L]
As the 20th century began, the increasingly influential Modernist movement, which came to dominate British art in the 20th century, drew its inspiration from Paul Cézanne and had little regard for 19th-century British painting.[67] Watts drew particular dislike from English critics, and Hope came to be seen as a passing fad, emblematic of the excessive sentimentality and poor taste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[53][68] By 1904 author E. Nesbit used Hope as a symbol of poor taste in her short story The Flying Lodger,[M] describing it as "a blind girl sitting on an orange", a description which would later be popularised by Agatha Christie in her 1942 novel Five Little Pigs (also known as Murder in Retrospect).[53][N]
While Watts's work was seen as outdated and sentimental by the English Modernist movement, his experimentation with Symbolism and Expressionism was beginning to draw respect from the European Modernists, notably the young Pablo Picasso, who reproduced Hope's intentionally distorted features and broad sweeps of blue in The Old Guitarist (1903–1904).[71][72] Despite Watts's fading reputation at home, by the time of his death in 1904 Hope had become a globally-recognised image. Reproductions circulated in cultures as diverse as Japan, Australia and Poland,[54] and Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, displayed a reproduction in his Summer White House at Sagamore Hill.[54] By 1916, Hope was well-known enough in the United States that the stage directions for Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel explicitly use the addition of a copy of Hope to the set to suggest improvements to the home over the passage of time.[73][O]
Although it was beginning to be seen as embodying sentimentality and bad taste, Hope continued to remain popular with the English public. In 1905 The Strand Magazine noted that it was the most popular picture in the Tate Gallery, and remarked that "there are few print-sellers who fail to exhibit it in their windows".[74] After Watts's death the Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the rights to make carbon copies of Hope, making reproductions of the image affordable for poorer households,[68] while in 1908 engraver Emery Walker began to sell full-colour photogravure prints of Hope, the first publicly available high quality colour reproductions of the image.[75]
In 1922 the American film Hope, directed by Legaren à Hiller and starring Mary Astor and Ralph Faulkner, was based on the imagined origins of the painting. In it Joan, a fisherman's wife, is treated poorly by the rest of her village in her husband's absence, and has only the hope of his return to cling to. His ship returns but bursts into flames, before he is washed up safe and well on shore. The story is interspersed with scenes of Watts explaining the story to a model, and with stills of the painting.[76] By the time the film was released, the fad for prints of Hope was long over, to the extent that references to it had become verbal shorthand for authors and artists wanting to indicate that a scene was set in the 1900s–1910s.[77] Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery closed the Watts Room.[78]
Later influence
Despite the steep decline in Watts's popularity, Hope continued to hold a place in popular culture,[14] and there remained those who considered it a major work. When the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of its Watts holdings in 1954, trade unionist and left-wing M.P. Percy Collick urged "Labour stalwarts" to attend the exhibition, supposedly privately recounting that he had recently met a Viennese Jewish woman who during "the terrors of the Nazi War" had drawn "renewed faith and hope" from her photograph of Hope.[64][P] Meanwhile, an influential 1959 sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., now known as Shattered Dreams, took Hope as a symbol of frustrated ambition and the knowledge that few people live to see their wishes fulfilled, arguing that "shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life", and against retreating into either apathetic cynicism, a fatalistic belief in God's will or escapist fantasy in response to failure.[79]
Myths continued to grow about supposed beliefs in the redemptive powers of Hope, and in the 1970s a rumour began to be spread that after Egypt was defeated by Israel during the Six-Day War the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops.[72] There is no evidence of this ever having taken place, and it is likely to stem from the fact that in early 1974, shortly after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt, the image of Hope was used on Jordanian postage stamps.[46][Q] Likewise, it is regularly claimed that Nelson Mandela kept a print of Hope in his cell on Robben Island, a claim for which there is no evidence.[46]
In 1990 Barack Obama, at the time a student at Harvard Law School, attended a sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ preached by the Rev Jeremiah Wright.[81][82][R] Taking the Books of Samuel as a starting point, Wright explained that he had studied Watts's Hope in the 1950s, and had rediscovered the painting when Dr Frederick G. Sampson delivered a lecture on it in the late 1980s (Sampson described it as "a study in contradictions"), before discussing the image's significance in the modern world.[81][82]
The painting depicts a harpist, a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits! [...] And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint tones floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope ... she has the audacity ... to make music ... and praise God ... on the one string ... she has left!
Wright's sermon left a great impression on Obama, who recounted Wright's sermon in detail in his memoir Dreams from My Father.[86] Soon after Dreams From My Father was published he entered politics, entering the Illinois Senate. In 2004 he was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In Obama's 2006 memoir The Audacity of Hope, he recollects that on being chosen to deliver this speech, he pondered the topics on which he had previously campaigned, and on major issues then affecting the nation, before thinking about the variety of people he had met while campaigning, all endeavouring in different ways to improve their own lives and to serve their country.[87]
It wasn't just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.' had once used in a sermon. The audacity of hope... It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family's story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 2006[87]
Obama's speech, on the theme of 'The Audacity of Hope', was extremely well-received. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year, and two years later published a second volume of memoirs, also titled The Audacity of Hope. Obama continued to campaign on the theme of "hope", and in his 2008 presidential campaign his staff requested that artist Shepard Fairey amend the wording of an independently-produced poster he had created, combining an image of Obama and the word progress, to instead read hope.[88] The resulting poster came to be viewed as the iconic image of Obama's ultimately successful election campaign.[89] In light of Obama's well-known interest in Watts's painting, and amid concerns over a perceived dislike of the British, in the last days of Gordon Brown's government historian and Labour Party activist Tristram Hunt proposed that Hope be transferred to the White House.[90] According to an unverified report in the Daily Mail, the offer was in fact made but rejected by Obama, who wished to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following controversial remarks made by Wright.[91]
Hope remains Watts's best known work,[14] and in recognition of its significance, a major redevelopment of the Watts Gallery completed in 2011 was named the Hope Appeal.[92][93]
Footnotes
- ^ In Watts's time, honours such as knighthoods were only bestowed on presidents of major institutions, not on even the most well respected artists.[7] In 1885 serious consideration was given to raising Watts to the peerage; had this happened, he would have been the first artist thus honoured.[8] In the same year, he refused the offer of a baronetcy.[5]
- ^ The anchor in some Christian depictions of Hope is a reference to Hebrews 6:19, "Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil".[12]
- ^ G. K. Chesterton, in his 1904 biography of Watts, attempted to describe the attitudes of artists who felt themselves surrounded by ugliness, in a culture in which what had previously been political and religious certainties had been thrown into turmoil by scientific and social developments. 'The attitude of that age [...] was an attitude of devouring and concentrated interest in things which were, by their own system, impossible or unknowable. Men were, in the main, agnostics: they said, "We do not know"; but not one of them ever ventured to say, "We do not care." In most eras of revolt and question, the sceptics reap something from their scepticism: if a man were a believer in the eighteenth century, there was Heaven; if he were an unbeliever, there was the Hell-Fire Club. But these men restrained themselves more than hermits for a hope that was more than half hopeless, and sacrificed hope itself for a liberty which they would not enjoy; they were rebels without deliverance and saints without reward. There may have been and there was something arid and over-pompous about them: a newer and gayer philosophy may be passing before us and changing many things for the better; but we shall not easily see any nobler race of men. And its supreme and acute difference from most periods of scepticism, from the later Renaissance, from the Restoration and from the hedonism of our own time was this, that when the creeds crumbled and the gods seemed to break up and vanish, it did not fall back, as we do, on things yet more solid and definite, upon art and wine and high finance and industrial efficiency and vices. It fell in love with abstractions and became enamoured of great and desolate words.'[18]
- ^ Burne-Jones created multiple versions of his Hope design throughout the rest of his life. Other than the Hopton window itself, significant versions of the work include an 1877 watercolour now in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and an 1896 oil painting now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[19]
- ^ The best known version of The Wheel of Fortune is the 1883 version now in the Musée d'Orsay, which bears little resemblance to Hope. However, at the time Hope was painted Watts owned an early sketch, now in the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, in which the figure of Fortune is blindfold against a blue background.[27]
- ^ British Museum item number 1816,0610.501; the lyre was sold to the museum by Lord Elgin in 1816. As of 2016 the lyre remains on public display.[28]
- ^ The use of the unstrung lyre as symbolic of separated lovers dates back at least to the early Roman Empire. Petronius's Satyricon, written in the first century A.D., mentions a visit to an art gallery by the narrator Encolpius in which he sees a painting of Apollo holding an unstrung lyre in tribute to his recently-deceased lover Hyacinth.[29]
- ^ Playing musical instruments using only a single string had been popularised in the early 19th century by Niccolò Paganini. It is not certain whether Watts was intentionally aiming to evoke a sense of ostentatious virtuosity in Hope.[30]
- ^ In the same review, Child described Watts's The Soul's Prison as a "sinister spider's web of red and green slime".[36]
- ^ "C'est une pensée exquise, insuffisamment mise en évidence par une exécution défaillante."
- ^ Not all staff at the South Kensington Museum welcomed Watts's gift; an internal memo of the time commented that "it is very difficult to deal with a man like this who has a very great idea of his own genius and in whom a great many of the public also believe".[52]
- ^ The only painting in the Tate collection considered as popular as Hope among art students was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix.[57]
- ^ "All the walls were white plaster, the furniture was white deal—what there was of it, which was precious little. There were no carpets—only white matting. And there was not a single ornament in a single room! There was a clock on the dining-room mantel-piece, but that could not be counted as an ornament because of the useful side of its character. There were only about six pictures—all of a brownish colour. One was the blind girl sitting on an orange with a broken fiddle. It is called Hope."[69]
- ^ "The walls were distempered an ascetic pale grey, and various reproductions hung upon them. Danté meeting Beatrice on a bridge, and that picture once described by a child as a 'blind girl sitting on an orange and called, I don't know why, Hope'."[70]
- ^ Time: October sixteenth, four years later; seven o'clock in the morning. Scene: The same room. There have been very evident improvements made. The room is not so bare; it is cosier [...] Hanging against the side of the run that faces front is Watts's "Hope".[73]
- ^ The truth of this story is unconfirmed. It does not appear in any of Collick's writings, and first appeared in a 1975 biography of Watts by Wilfred Blunt based on private conversation between Blunt and Collick.[64]
- ^ The use of Hope on Jordanian stamps was not a response to military defeat, but had been planned well before the war took place.[46] Although a token force of Jordanian troops participated in the Yom Kippur War, their presence was symbolic and there was an agreement between Israel and Jordan that their forces would not engage with each other.[80]
- ^ Obama's Dreams From My Father places him as attending this sermon in 1988 before entering Harvard Law School, but Wright's own records show that the sermon was delivered in 1990.[83] During the summer of 1990 Obama worked as an associate attorney at the Chicago firm of Hopkins & Sutter so was in the city at the time.[84] Obama admits in the preface to Dreams From My Father that the chronology of events in the book is unreliable.[85]
- ^ Wright's own text of the sermon does not match that recorded by Obama in all aspects. In particular, Obama misremembered Wright's phrase "The Audacity to Hope" as "The Audacity of Hope".[83]
References
Notes
- ^ a b c Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 20.
- ^ a b Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 22.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 21.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 23.
- ^ a b c d Warner 1996, p. 238.
- ^ a b Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 33.
- ^ Robinson 2007, p. 135.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 69.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 40.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. xi.
- ^ a b Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 42.
- ^ a b c d Tromans 2011, p. 11.
- ^ Warner 1996, p. 30.
- ^ a b c d Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 220.
- ^ a b Letter from Watts to Madeline Wyndham, 8 December 1885, now in the Tate Archives, quoted Tromans 2011, p. 70
- ^ Warner 1996, p. 31.
- ^ a b c d Tromans 2011, p. 12.
- ^ Chesterton 1904, p. 12.
- ^ a b c d e f g Tromans 2011, p. 13.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 16.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 17.
- ^ a b c Warner 1996, p. 135.
- ^ a b c d e f Tromans 2011, p. 19.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 60.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 222.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 39.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Tromans 2011, p. 14.
- ^ "Lyre". London: The British Museum. Retrieved 24 September 2016.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 15.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 14–15.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 15–16.
- ^ "Quisby and Barkins at the Grosvenor Gallery". Fun. London: Gilbert Dalziel: 224. 19 May 1886., quoted Tromans 2011, p. 55
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 20.
- ^ "The Grosvenor Gallery". The Times. No. 31749. London. 3 May 1886. col A, p. 7. template uses deprecated parameter(s) (help)
- ^ "Art Chronicle". The Portfolio. London: 84. April 1886. Retrieved 24 September 2016.
- ^ a b Child, Theodore (June 1886). "Pictures in London and Paris". The Fortnightly Review. 45 (39). London: Chapman and Hall: 789.
- ^ Phillips, Claude (July 1886). "Correspondence d'Angleterre". Gazette des Beaux-Arts (in French). Paris: 76.
- ^ Warner 1996, p. 26.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 20–21.
- ^ a b c d e Tromans 2011, p. 21.
- ^ Bills & Bryant 2008, p. 223.
- ^ a b c d Tromans 2011, p. 34.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 60–61.
- ^ Burns 1908, p. 17.
- ^ Shrewsbury 1918, p. 64.
- ^ a b c d Tromans 2011, p. 62.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 35.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 21–22.
- ^ a b c d e f g Tromans 2011, p. 22.
- ^ a b UK Retail Price Index inflation figures are based on data from Clark, Gregory (2017). "The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved 7 May 2024.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 64.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 36.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 9.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 49.
- ^ Bills 2011, p. 9.
- ^ Bills 2011, p. 5.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 37.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 23.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 24.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 28.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 66.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 7.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 33.
- ^ a b c Tromans 2011, p. 59.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 35–36.
- ^ Davies, Lucy (19 November 2014). "Dorothy Dene: Lord Leighton's secret lover?". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 23 December 2014.
{{cite news}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
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suggested) (help) - ^ Warner 1996, p. 11.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 51.
- ^ Nesbit, Edith (2013). Delphi Complete Novels of E. Nesbit. Delphi Classics. ISBN 9781909496873. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
- ^ Christie 1942, p. 86.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 40.
- ^ a b Barlow, Paul (2004). "Where there's life there's". Tate. Archived from the original on 11 September 2004. Retrieved 12 March 2010.
{{cite web}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ^ a b Grimké 1920, p. 31.
- ^ "Which Are the Most Popular Pictures? II.—In the Tate Gallery". The Strand Magazine. London: George Newnes. January 1905., reproduced Tromans 2011, p. 37
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 51–52.
- ^ Tromans 2011, pp. 54–55.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 52.
- ^ Bills 2011, p. 7.
- ^ King, Martin Luther (1959). "Shattered Dreams". Atlanta, GA: The King Center. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
- ^ Ofer Aderet (12 September 2013). "Jordan and Israel cooperated during Yom Kippur War, documents reveal". Haaretz.
- ^ a b Obama 1995, p. 292.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 63.
- ^ a b Tromans 2011, p. 74.
- ^ Aguilar, Louis (11 July 1990). "Survey: Law firms slow to add minority partners". Chicago Tribune. p. 1 (Business). Retrieved 15 June 2008.
- ^ Obama 1995, p. xvii.
- ^ a b Obama 1995, pp. 292–293.
- ^ a b Obama 2006, p. 356.
- ^ Ben Arnon, "How the Obama "Hope" Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey", Huffington Post, October 13, 2009. Retrieved January 17, 2009.
- ^ "Copyright battle over Obama image". BBC Online. BBC. 5 February 2009. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
- ^ Hunt, Tristram (14 January 2009). "The perfect gift to soothe Obama's British suspicions". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
- ^ Walters, Simon; Lowther, William (23 January 2010). "Why did Obama turn down offer from No 10 for the famous painting that set him on the road to the White House?". Daily Mail. London. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
- ^ Tromans 2011, p. 8.
- ^ Staley & Underwood 2006, p. 70.
Bibliography
- Bills, Mark (2011). Painting for the Nation: G. F. Watts at the Tate. Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9561022-5-6.
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: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bills, Mark; Bryant, Barbara (2008). G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-15294-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Burns, James (1908). Sermons in Art by the Great Masters. London: Duckworth.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Chesterton, G. K. (1904). G. F. Watts. London: Duckworth. OCLC 26773336.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Christie, Agatha (1942). Murder in Retrospect (1985 ed.). New York, NY: Bantam Books. ISBN 9780553350388.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Grimké, Angelina W. (1920). Rachel: A Play in Three Acts. Boston: The Cornhill Company.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Obama, Barack (1995). Dreams From My Father (2008 UK ed.). Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-84767-094-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Obama, Barack (2006). The Audacity of Hope (2007 UK ed.). Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-84767-083-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Robinson, Leonard (2007). William Etty: The Life and Art. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-2531-0. OCLC 751047871.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Shrewsbury, Henry William (1918). The Visions of an Artist: Studies in G. F. Watts, R. A., O. M.; with Verse Interpretations. London: Charles H. Kelly.
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(help) - Staley, Allen; Underwood, Hilary (2006). Painting the Cosmos: Landscapes by G. F. Watts. Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery. ISBN 0-9548230-5-2.
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: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Tromans, Nicholas (2011). Hope: The Life and Times of a Victorian Icon. Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9561022-7-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Warner, Malcolm (1996). The Victorians: British Painting 1837–1901. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-8109-6342-9. OCLC 59600277.
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