Although
Victorian painting styles went out of fashion soon after Watts's death,
Hope has remained extremely influential. Mark Bills, curator of the Watts Gallery, described
Hope as "the most famous and influential" of all Watts's paintings and "a jewel of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement". In 1889 socialist agitator
John Burns visited Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel, and saw a photograph of
Hope among their possessions. After Henrietta explained its significance to him, efforts were made by the coalition of workers' groups which were to become the
Labour Party to recruit Watts. Although determined to stay outside 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. (This is believed to be the
red chalk version of
Hope in the Watts Gallery.) 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. 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". Henry Cameron's platinotype reproductions of the first version of
Hope had circulated since the painting's exhibition, but were slow to produce and expensive to buy. From the early 1890s photographer
Frederick Hollyer produced large numbers of cheap platinotype reproductions of the second version, particularly after Hollyer formalised his business relationship with Watts in 1896. Hollyer sold the reproductions both via
printsellers around the country and directly via catalogue, and the print proved extremely popular.
Artistic influence '', Frederic Leighton (1895)|alt=sleeping woman dressed in orange In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting
Flaming June, which also depicted Dorothy Dene, on the composition of Watts's
Hope.
Flaming June kept the central figure's pose, but showing her as relaxed and sleeping. Dene had worked closely with Leighton since the 1880s, and was left the then huge sum of £5000 (about £ in terms) in Leighton's will when he died the following year. By this time,
Hope was becoming an
icon of English popular culture, propelled by the wide distribution of reproductions; 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. As the 20th century began, the increasingly influential
Modernist movement drew its inspiration from
Paul Cézanne and had little regard for 19th-century British painting. 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. By 1904 author
E. Nesbit used
Hope as a symbol of poor taste in her short story
The Flying Lodger, 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). Although Watts's work was seen as outdated and sentimental by the English Modernist movement, his experimentation with Symbolism and
Expressionism drew respect from the European Modernists, notably the young
Pablo Picasso, who echoed ''Hope's
intentionally distorted features and broad sweeps of blue in The Old Guitarist'' (1903–1904). 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, and
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, displayed a reproduction in his
Summer White House at
Sagamore Hill. 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. Some were beginning to see it as embodying sentimentality and bad taste, but
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." After Watts's death the Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the rights to make
carbon print copies of
Hope, making reproductions of the image affordable for poorer households, and 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. 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. 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. Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery removed their collection of Watts's works from permanent display.
Later influence Despite the steep decline in Watts's popularity,
Hope continued to hold a place in popular culture, 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 photographic copy. Meanwhile,
Shattered Dreams, an influential 1959 sermon by
Martin Luther King Jr., 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. Myths continued to grow about supposed beliefs in the redemptive powers of
Hope, and in the 1970s a rumour began spread that after Israel defeated Egypt in the
Six-Day War, the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops.
The resulting poster came to be viewed as the iconic image of Obama's ultimately successful election campaign. 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. According to an unverified report in the
Daily Mail, the offer was made but rejected by Obama, who wished to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following
controversial remarks made by Wright.
Hope remains Watts's best known work, and formed the theme of the opening ceremony of the
1998 Winter Paralympics in
Nagano. In recognition of its continued significance, a major redevelopment of the
Watts Gallery completed in 2011 was named the Hope Appeal. ==Notes==