Hope is a Symbolist oil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining. The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous. While his use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked the painting. Hope proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its message. Reproductions in platinotype, and later cheap carbon prints, soon began to be sold.
Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he had agreed to donate his most important works to the nation and felt it would be inappropriate not to include Hope. Consequently, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version. On its completion Watts sold the original and donated the copy to the South Kensington Museum (the Victoria and Albert Museum); thus, this second version is better known than the original. He painted at least two further versions for private sale.
As cheap reproductions of Hope, and from 1908 high-quality prints, began to circulate in large quantities, it became a widely popular image. President Theodore Roosevelt displayed a copy at his Sagamore Hill home in New York; reproductions circulated worldwide; and a 1922 film depicted Watts's creation of the painting and an imagined story behind it. By this time Hope was coming to seem outdated and sentimental, and Watts was rapidly falling out of fashion. In 1938 the Tate Gallery ceased to keep their collection of Watts's works on permanent display.
Despite the decline in Watts's popularity, Hope remained influential. Martin Luther King Jr. based a 1959 sermon later named Shattered Dreams, on the theme of the painting, as did Jeremiah Wright in Chicago in 1990. Among the congregation for the latter was the young Barack Obama, who was deeply moved. Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and as the title of his 2006 book; he based his successful 2008 presidential campaign around the theme of "Hope".
Background
George Frederic Watts was born in London in 1817, the son of a musical instrument manufacturer. His two brothers died in 1823 and his mother in 1826, giving Watts an obsession with death throughout his life. Meanwhile, his father's strict evangelical Christianity led to both a deep knowledge of the Bible and a strong dislike of organised religion. Watts was apprenticed as a sculptor at the age of 10, and six years later was proficient enough as an artist to earn a living as a portrait painter and cricket illustrator. Aged 18 he gained admission to the Royal Academy schools, although he disliked their methods and his attendance was intermittent. In 1837 Watts was commissioned by Greek shipping magnate Alexander Constantine Ionides to copy a portrait of his father by 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.
In 1843 he travelled to Italy where he remained for four years. 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. His portraits were extremely highly regarded. In 1867 he was elected a Royal Academician, at the time the highest honour available to an artist, although he rapidly became disillusioned with the culture of the Royal Academy. From 1870 onwards he became widely renowned as a painter of allegorical and mythical subjects; by this time, he was one of the most highly regarded artists in the world. 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. In 1884 a selection of 50 of his works was shown at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Subject
Hope is 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 depict her as a young woman, typically holding a flower or an anchor.
During Watts's lifetime, European culture had begun to question the concept of hope. A new school of philosophy at the time, based on the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, saw hope as a negative attribute that encouraged humanity to expend their energies on futile efforts. The Long Depression of the 1870s wrecked both the economy and confidence of Britain, and Watts felt that the encroaching mechanisation of daily life, and the importance of material prosperity to Britain's increasingly dominant middle class, were making modern life increasingly soulless.
In late 1885 Watts's adopted daughter Blanche Clogstoun had just lost her infant daughter Isabel to illness, and Watts wrote to a friend that "I see nothing but uncertainty, contention, conflict, beliefs unsettled and nothing established in place of them."Letter from Watts to Madeline Wyndham, 8 December 1885, now in the Tate Archives, quoted . 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.
Other artists of the period had already begun to experiment with other 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. Meanwhile, Edward Burne-Jones, a 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. Burne-Jones's design showed Hope upright and defiant in a prison cell, holding a flowering rod.
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 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. (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.) By the end of 1885 Watts had settled on the design of the painting.
Composition
Hope shows its central character alone, with no other human figures visible and without her traditional fellow virtues, Love (also known as Charity) and Faith. She is dressed in classical costume, based on the Elgin Marbles; 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. Her pose is based on that of Michelangelo's Night, in an intentionally strained position. She sits on a small, imperfect orange globe with wisps of cloud around its circumference, against an almost blank mottled blue background. The figure is illuminated faintly from behind, as if by starlight, and also directly from the front as if the observer is the source of light. 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.
The design bears close similarities to Burne-Jones's Luna (painted in watercolour 1870 and in oils 1872–1875), which also shows a female figure in classical drapery on a globe surrounded by clouds. 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. Other works which have been suggested as possible influences on Hope include Burne-Jones's The Wheel of Fortune (c. 1870), Albert Moore's Beads (1875), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's A Sea–Spell (1877), and The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder (1884).
Hope is 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. It is believed to be the first time a European artist depicted Hope as blind.
The figure of Hope holds a broken lyre, based on an ancient Athenian wood and tortoiseshell lyre then on display in the British Museum. Although broken musical instruments were a frequently occurring motif in European art, they had never previously been associated with Hope. Hope's lyre has only a single string remaining, on which she attempts to play. She strains to listen to the sound of the single unbroken string, symbolising both persistence and fragility, and the closeness of hope and despair. 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.
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. The distance of the star from the central figure, and the fact that it is outside her field of vision even were she not blindfolded, suggests an ambiguity. It provides an uplifting message to the viewer that things are not as bad for the central character as she believes, and introduces a further element of pathos in that she is unaware of hope existing elsewhere.
Reception
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. Also, at this time the Grosvenor Gallery was generally more receptive than the Royal Academy to experimentation. Hope was given the prime spot in the exhibition, in the centre of the gallery's longest wall.
Watts's use of colour was an immediate success with critics; even those who otherwise disliked the piece were impressed by Watts's skilful use of colour, tone and harmony. Its subject and Watts's technique immediately drew criticism from the press. 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". The Portfolio praised Watts's Repentance of Cain but thought Hope "a poetic but somewhat inferior composition". Theodore Child of The Fortnightly Review dismissed Hope as "a ghastly and apocalyptic allegory", while the highly regarded critic Claude Phillips considered it "an exquisite concept, insufficiently realised by a failed execution".