Hope is a symbolic oil painting by British painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. Very different from the previous treatment on the subject, it shows the only female figure who blindfolded his eyes on the globe, playing a lyre that has only one string left. The background is almost empty, the only feature seen is a single star. Watts deliberately uses symbolism that is not traditionally associated with the hope of making the meaning of the painting ambiguous. While the use of color in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of the exhibition many critics disliked the painting. Hope is proving popular with the Aesthetic Movement, which sees beauty as the ultimate goal of art and does not care about the ambiguity of its message. Reproduction in platinotype, and then inexpensive carbon molds, soon goes on sale.
Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he agreed to donate his most important works to his people and found it inappropriate not to include Hope. . As a result, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version. Upon completion, Watt sold the original and donated a copy to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum); thus, this second version is better known than the original. He paints at least two further versions for personal sales.
As a cheap Reproduction , and from 1908 high-quality prints, began to circulate in large numbers, it became a very popular image. President Theodore Roosevelt displayed a copy at his home in Sagamore Hill in New York; reproduction circulating around the world; and a 1922 film depicting the creation of Watts and the imagined story behind it. Currently Hope comes to look obsolete and sentimental, and Watts quickly falls out of fashion. In 1938, Tate Gallery stopped storing the collection of their Watts works on a permanent screen.
Despite the drop in popularity of Watts, Hope remains influential. Martin Luther King Jr. based on the 1959 sermon, now known as Shattered Dreams, on the theme of the painting, as Jeremiah Wright did in Chicago in 1990. Among the congregation for the second is young Barack Obama. , deeply moved. Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of the keynote address of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and as the title of his 2006 book; he based his successful 2008 presidential campaign with the theme "Hope".
Video Hope (painting)
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George Frederic Watts was born in London in 1817, the son of a musical instrument maker. Two brothers died in 1823 and his mother in 1826, giving Watts an obsession with death throughout his life. Meanwhile, his father's strict Christianity of evangelicals led to both an in-depth knowledge of the Bible and a strong dislike of organized religion. Watts apprenticed as a sculptor at the age of 10, and six years later were quite skilled as an artist to earn a living as a portrait painter and cricket illustrator. Aged 18 he gets admission to the Royal Academy school, although he does not like their method and his presence alternates. In 1837 Watt was commissioned by the Greek sending king Alexander Constantine Ionides to copy his father's portrait by Samuel Lane; Ionides preferred the Watts version to the original and immediately commissioned two more paintings from him, allowing Watts to devote himself full-time to painting.
In 1843 he went to Italy where he lived for four years. Upon his return to London, he suffered from depression and painted a number of very bleak works. His skills were widely celebrated, and in 1856 he decided to devote himself to portraits. The portrait is highly respected. In 1867 he was elected a Royal Academician, at the time of the highest award available to an artist, although he quickly became disillusioned with the culture of the Royal Academy. From 1870 onwards he became widely known as a painter of allegorical and mythical subjects; at this time, he is one of the most respected artists in the world. In 1881 he added a glass-roofed gallery to his home in Little Holland House, which opened to the public at the weekend, which further enhanced his fame. In 1884, a total of 50 works were featured at the New York Metropolitan Art Museum.
Maps Hope (painting)
Subject
Hopes are traditionally regarded by Christians as theological virtues (virtues associated with God's grace, not by work or self-improvement). Because the ancient artistic representation of personification describes it as a young woman, it usually holds flowers or anchors.
During Watts's lifetime, European culture began to question the concept of hope. A school of new philosophy at the time, based on Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, sees hope as a negative attribute that drives mankind to expend their energy on futile efforts. The Long Depression of the 1870s destroyed Britain's economy and beliefs, and Watts felt that the mechanization that disrupted everyday life, and the importance of material prosperity for the increasingly dominant British middle class, made modern life less soulless.
In 1885 Watts, the adopted daughter, Blanche Clogstoun had just lost her baby girl, Isabel, because of illness, and Watts wrote to a friend that "I see nothing but uncertainty, dispute, conflict, unresolved beliefs and nothing replace them. " Watts sets out to re-imagine Hope's portrayal in a society where economic decline and environmental destruction are increasingly leading people to question the idea of ​​God's progress and existence.
Other artists of that time have begun experimenting with alternative methods to describe Hope in art. Some, such as the young painter Evelyn De Morgan, drew the image of Psalm 137 and his description of the exiled musicians who refused to play for their captors. Meanwhile, Edward Burne-Jones, a Watt friend who specializes in painting mythological and allegorical topics, in 1871 completed a cartoon for a stained glass window that was planned which depicted Hope for St Margaret's Church in Hopton-on-Sea. The Burne-Jones design shows upright and challenging Hopes in a prison cell, holding a flowering stalk.
Watts generally works on his allegorical painting and is deadly for long periods, but it seems Hope is completed relatively quickly. He left no record of the creation of his work, but his close friend Emilie Barrington noted that "a good friend of mine", almost certainly Dorothy Dene, was modeled for Hope in 1885. (Dorothy Dene, nà © e There is Alice Pullen, better known as the model for Frederic Leighton but is also known to have a model for Watts in this period.Although the features of Hope's face are obscured in Watts paintings, his distinctive jaws and hair are both recognizable. the end of 1885 Watt has set the design of the painting.
Composition
Hope to sit on the globe, with the eyes bandaged playing in a lyre that has all the broken strings but one of those little clamor poor he is trying to get all the music possible, listening with all his strength for a small voice - do you like the idea?
Hope shows its own central character, without any other human figures seen and without the good of the traditional fellow, Love (also known as Amal) and Faith. She wore a classic costume, based on Elgin Marbles; Nicholas Tromans of Kingston University speculates that his Greek clothing style was deliberately chosen to evoke the ambivalent nature of hope in Greek mythology over the certainty of the Christian tradition. The pose is based on Michelangelo's Night , in a deliberate position. She sits in a small, imperfect orange world with a cloud around her, with an almost empty, blue background. The figure is illuminated from behind, as if by starlight, and also directly from the front as if the observer is the source of light. Watts use light and tone to avoid a clear definition of shape, creating glittering and dissolving effects more often associated with pastel work than with oil paintings.
This design has a close resemblance to Burne-Jones Luna (painted with watercolor 1870 and in oil c. Ã, 1872-1875), which also shows a female figure in a classic curtain in a world surrounded by clouds. Like many of Watts's works, the style of painting is rooted in the European Symbolic movement, but also very interesting in the Venetian painting school. Other works that have been suggested as possible influences on Hope include the Burne-Jones Wheel of Fortune (c.a, 1870), Albert Moore's Beads (1875), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's A Sea-Spell (1877), and The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder (1884).
Hoping closely related to The Loving Child, , completed by Watts in 1885, which also shows the personification of one of the traditional virtues (in this case Love) sitting on the globe shrouded in clouds. In the traditional depictions of virtue, Love is shown with eyes closed while Hope is not; in Hope and Unemployed Watt reverses this image, depicts Love looking straight ahead and Hope as blind. It is believed to be the first time a European artist has described Hope as blind.
The figure of Hope holds a broken harp, based on ancient Athenian wood and harp leather which is then on display at the British Museum. Although defective musical instruments are a frequent motif in European art, they were never previously associated with Hope. Hope lyre only has one string left, where he tries to play. He tried to listen to the unbroken single rope, symbolizing persistence and vulnerability, and the proximity of hope and despair. Watts has recently shown an interest in the idea of ​​continuity between visual arts and music, and has previously used musical instruments as a way to refresh the subject of his portrait.
Above the central figure shines a small single star at the very top of the image, serves as a symbol of further hope beyond that of the central figure himself. The star's distance from the central figure, and the fact that he is outside his field of vision even he does not blindfold, indicates ambiguity. It gives the audience an exhilarating message that things are not bad for a central character as he believes, and introduces a further element of pathos in that he is unaware of the expectations that exist elsewhere.
Reception
Hope's dress is a dark color, and her figure is revealed to us by the wan's light from the front and the pale light of the stars in the beyone sky. This beautiful illumination fuses, so to say, the colors, the substance and even the overall shape and contours, and show magic, vaguely like dreams, charms that hang out with the subject, and, as in all great art, instill grace for the expression of the theme.
Lover! a young woman tied herself into a knot and tried to do the trick-seat. He is balanced with Dutch pantomime cheese, which floats on stage with age and color that is not sure. The girl was no worse for a warm bath.
Although the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is traditionally the most prestigious place for British artists to showcase their new material, Watts chose to show Hope at the smaller Grosvenor Gallery. In 1882 the Grosvenor Gallery has held a retrospective exhibition of Watts's work and he feels attachment to the place. Also, nowadays the Grosvenor Gallery is generally easier to accept than the Royal Academy to experiment. Hope is given the main place in the exhibition, in the middle of the longest wall of the gallery.
The use of Watts color is a direct success with critics; even those who did not like the work were impressed by the use of Watts's skillful colors, tone, and harmony. His subject and Watts technique immediately drew criticism from the press. The Times describes it as "one of the most interesting of Watts's recent photographs" but observes that while "in the dot of Mr. Watts rarely gives us something more beautiful and subtle... and there is extraordinary beauty in the picture, although it must be possessed that the angle is too numerous and too marked ". Portfolio praised Watts Repentance of Cloth but thought Hope "poetic composition but rather low". Theodore Child of The Nightnight Review dismisses Hope as a "horrible and apocalyptic allegory", while critic Claude Phillips is highly regarded regarded as "a beautiful concept, poorly realized by a failed man. " execution".
Despite initial refusals by critics, Hope is proving to be popular with many people in the influential Aesthetic Movement, who regard beauty as the ultimate goal of art. Watts, who sees art as a medium for moral messages, deeply dislikes the doctrine of "art for the sake of art," but Aestheticism followers greatly admire the use of Watts' color and symbolism in Hope . As soon as the poetry exhibition based on the image begins to be published, and the reproduction of platinotype - at the time the photography process is most capable of capturing variations of subtle tones - became popular. Reproduction of the first platinotype Hope was produced by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, son of a close friend of Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron.
Religious interpretation
Because Hope is a work that can not be read by using the traditional interpretation of symbolism in painting, Watts deliberately lets its meaning ambiguous, and a bleaker interpretation almost immediately challenged by Christian thinkers after his exhibition. Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth felt that Hope was the companion for Watts's 1885 Mammon in describing false gods and the dangers of waiting for those who tried to follow them without faith. Forsyth writes that the picture shows a lack of faith, illustrating that the loss of faith places too much weight on hope alone, and that the message of the painting is that in the godless world created by technology Hope has purposely blinded herself and listened only to music which he can make himself. Forsyth's interpretation, that the central figure is not himself the personification of hope, but the representation of humanity is too horrified to the world he created to see, instead deliberately blinding himself and living in hope, became popular among other theologians.
Watts' supporters claim that the image of Hope has an almost miraculous redemptive power. In his 1908 sermon in the Arts by the Great Gentlemen, Presbyterian Minister Stoke Newington James Burns wrote of a woman who had walked to the Thames River in order to commit suicide but had passed the image of > Hoping in the shop window and deeply inspired by the view that instead of attempting suicide, he instead moved to Australia. In 1918 Watts biographer Henry William Shrewsbury wrote of "a poor girl, a broken and broken character, roaming the streets of London with the feeling that nothing is left but to destroy herself" i>, using his last money to buy the photograph, until "seeing it every day, the message sinks into his soul, and he fights back to a pure and honorable life." When the music hall star Marie Lloyd died in 1922 after a life full of alcohol, illness, and depression, it was noted that among his possessions was a printout of Hope ; a journalist observes that among his other belongings, it appears "like a good deed in a mischievous world".
Watts himself is ambivalent when asked about the religious meaning of the picture, saying that "I make Hope blind so that I do not expect anything", although after his death, Mary Seton Watts's widow wrote that the message of the painting is that "Faith must be his companion." Hope. Faith is a substance, a belief in things to hope for, because it is evidence of things not seen. "Malcolm Warner, the curator of the Yale Center for British Art, interprets the work differently, writing in 1996 that" the calm voice of a single lira string is all that remains of music full of religious beliefs; those who are still listening blindfolded with their eyes closed. the feeling that, even if there is a real reason for Hope, they can not see it; Hope remains a virtue, but in a time of weak and ambiguous scientific materialism â €.
In 1900, shortly before his death, Watts again painted a character in Faith, Hope, and Charity (now at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin). It shows him smiling and with his lyre restrung, working with Love to persuade the Faith to be covered in blood to sheathe his sword; Tromans writes that "his message would seem that if Faith would continue his importance to mankind... it would have to be in a role that is subject to more constant love and hope."
Second version
At the Hope showcased, Watts has committed to donate his most significant works to his people, and although he received many offers for paintings that he found inappropriate to include Hope in the donation this, given the fact that it's already considered one of his most important photos. In the middle of 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted copies of the work, with the intention that the duplicate was donated to the state that enabled him to sell the real one. Although the compositions of these two paintings are identical, they are radically different in nuances. The central figure is smaller in relation to the globe, and its color is darker and less fancy, giving it a more grim feel than the original.
By the end of 1886 this second version was one of nine paintings donated to the South Kensington Museum (now the Museum of Victoria and Albert) in the first installment of the Watts prize for the nation. Meanwhile, the original was put on display in Nottingham before being sold to the steam tractor businessman Joseph Ruston in 1887. Its existence was long unknown until in 1986 it was auctioned off at Sotheby for Ã, £ 869,000 (about Ã, Â £ 2.3 million in year 2018), 100 years after the first exhibition.
At their donation to the South Kensington Museum, nine works donated by Watt were hung on stairs leading to the library, but Hope proved a popular loan to other institutions as a symbol of British art today. At the 1887 Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester, the entire wall is dedicated to the works of Watts. Hope , recently completed but already the most famous of Watts's works, is placed in the center of this screen. It was then exhibited at the 1885 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition and 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, before being transferred to Munich for display at Glaspalast. In 1897, one of 17 Watt's works was transferred to the newly created British Art Gallery (commonly known as Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain); at the time, Watts was so respected that the entire new museum room was dedicated to his works. The Tate Gallery considers Hope as one of the highlights of their collection and does not continue the South Kensington Museum's practice of lending the work to overseas exhibitions.
Other painted versions
Needing funds to pay for his new home and studio in Compton, Surrey, now Watts Gallery, Watts earns more copies of Hope for personal sales. A small version of 66 x 50.8 cm (26.0 x 20.0 inches) was sold to a private collector in Manchester at a certain point between 1886 and 1890, and exhibited at the Free Pictures Exhibition at Canning Town (an annual event organized by Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett in an attempt to bring beauty into the lives of the poor) in 1897. Now at the National Gallery of South Africa Iziko, Cape Town. Another version of Watts, including a rainbow that surrounds the central figure to reduce the gloom of the image, was purchased by Richard Budgett, a widower whose wife had been a great admirer of Watts, and remained in family ownership until 1997. Watts gave his first oil sketch to Frederic Leighton; has been in the collection of Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool since 1923. Watts is thought to have painted at least one further version, but his location is unknown.
Legacy
Although the style of Victorian painting came out of fashion soon after Watts's death, Hope remained very influential. Mark Bills, curator of Watts Gallery, describes Hope as the most famous and influential of all Watts's paintings and the "gems of the nineteenth-century Symbolist movement". In 1889, the socialist agitator John Burns visited Samuel and Henrietta Barnett at Whitechapel, and saw a photo of Hope among their possessions. After Henrietta explained his significance to him, efforts were made by a coalition of labor groups that became Labor Party to recruit Watts. Though determined to stay out of politics, Watts wrote in favor of a striking busmen in 1891, and in 1895 contributed a lime reproduction of Hope to the Mission for Sailors at Poplar to support London dock workers. (This is believed to be the red lime version of Hope now in Watts Gallery.) Watts' passivity of Hope invites criticism from some people in the socialist movement, who see it as a reluctance to commit to action. Leading art critic Charles Lewis Hind also hated this passivity, writing in 1902 that "This is not a strong admirable job, but solitude and sadness find comfort in it, reflecting the hopes of a beautiful, sad, despairing of those who are cursed with vitality low, and poor physical health ".
Reproduction platinotype Henry Cameron from the first version of Hope has been in circulation since painting exhibitions, but is slow to produce and expensive to buy. From the early 1890s photographer Frederick Hollyer produced a large number of inexpensive platinum reproductions of the second version, especially after Hollyer inaugurated his business relationship with Watts in 1896. Hollyer sells reproductions both through printmakers across the country and directly through catalogs, and print proved very popular.
Artistic Influence
In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting Flaming June, which also portrays Dorothy Dene, on the composition of Watts Hope . Flaming June retains the pose of the central figure, but shows it as relaxing and sleeping. Dene has teamed up with Leighton since the 1880s, and then left a huge amount of Ã, Â £ 5000 (about Ã, Â £ 500,000 in 2018) in the will of Leighton when he died the following year. At this time, Hope has become an icon of British popular culture, driven by a vast reproduction distribution; in 1898, a year after the opening of Tate Gallery, his director noted that Hope is one of the two most popular works in their collection among students.
As the twentieth century began, an increasingly influential Modernist movement drew its inspiration from Paul CÃ © Å © zanne and paid little attention to 19th century English paintings. Watts drew a certain displeasure from British critics, and Hope came to be seen as a fad, a symbol of excessive sentimentality and bad taste from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1904 the author E. Nesbit used Hope as a symbol of bad taste in his short story The Flying Lodger , describing it as "a blind girl sitting on orange", a description that would later be popularized by Agatha Christie in his novel in 1942 Five Little Pigs (also known as Murder under Retrospection ).
Although Watts's work is seen as obsolete and sentimental by the British Modernist movement, his experiments with Symbolism and Expressionism drew the respect of the European Modernists, especially the young Pablo Picasso, who echoes the Hope's features that are deliberately distorted and swept wide. blue in The Old Guitarist (1903-1904). Despite Watts' fading reputation at home, at the time of his death in 1904 Hope has become a globally recognized image. Reproduction circulates in diverse cultures such as Japan, Australia and Poland, and Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, performs reproductions in Summer White House at Sagamore Hill. In 1916, Hope was quite well known in the United States that the stage direction for Angelina Weld GrimkÃÆ'Â's Rachel explicitly used the addition of a copy of Please to set to suggest repairs to the house over the course of time.
Some began to see it as sentimentality and discomfort, but Hope continued to remain popular among the British public. In 1905 The Strand Magazine noted that it was the most popular image in the Tate Gallery, and said that "there were some print sellers who failed to show it off in their windows." After Watt's death, Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the right to make carbon copies of Hope , making affordable image reproductions for poorer households, and in 1908, Emery Walker's engraver began selling full-color. photogravure prints of Hope , the first publicly available high quality public image reproduction.
In 1922 the American film Hope, was directed by Legaren ÃÆ' Hiller and starred Mary Astor and Ralph Faulkner, based on the imagined origins of the painting. In it Joan, a fisherman's wife, was treated badly by the rest of her village in her husband's absence, and only had hope of her return. His ship returned but burned, before he was swept safely and safely on the beach. The story is interspersed with scenes of Watt that explain the story to the model, and with his paintings. By the time the film was released, the trend for the Hope print was long over, to the point that it became a verbal abbreviation for writers and artists who wanted to show that the scene was organized in the 1900s 1910s. Watts's reputation continued to fade when his artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 Tate's Gallery removed the collection of their Watts work from the permanent screen.
The next effect
Despite the sharp decline in Watts's popularity, Hope continues to hold a place in popular culture, and some still regard it as the main job. When the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of Watts ownership in 1954, the union and left wing M.P. Percy Collick urged the "hard laborers" to attend the exhibition, which should personally tell that he recently met a Viennese Jewish woman who during the "Nazi War terror" attracted "new faith and hope" from his photographic copy. Meanwhile, the influential 1959 sermon of Martin Luther King Jr., now known as Shattered Dreams, takes Hope as a symbol of the frustrating ambitions and knowledge visible only to some people. their hopes are fulfilled, arguing that "shattered dreams are the hallmark of our mortal life", and fight back into apathy cynicism, fatalistic belief in the will of God or escapist fantasy in response to failure.
The myth continues to grow about the alleged belief in the power of redemption of Hope, and in the 1970s a rumor began to spread that after Israel defeated Egypt in the Six-Day War, the Egyptian government issued copies to troops. There is no evidence that this happened, and the story probably comes from the fact that in early 1974, shortly after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt, the image of Hope arose in postage shipping from Jordan. Likewise, it regularly claims that Nelson Mandela kept the Hope print in his cell on Robben Island, a claim that has no evidence.
In 1990 Barack Obama, then a student at Harvard Law School, attended a sermon at Christ Trinity United Church preached by Jeremiah Wright. Taking Samuel's Book as a starting point, Wright explained that he had studied Watts of Hope in the 1950s, and had rediscovered the painting when Dr. Frederick G. Sampson delivered a lecture about it in the late 1980s (Sampson describes it as a "study in contradiction"), before discussing the importance of drawing in the modern world.
The painting depicts a harpist, a woman who glimpsed herself sitting on a huge mountain top. Until you look closer and see that the woman is bruised and covered in blood, wearing ragged rags, the harp is reduced to a single frayed string. Your eyes are then pulled down to the scene below, down to the valley below, everywhere is the damage due to hunger, drums of war, the world moaning under disputes and deprivation. This world, a world where cruise ships dump more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white greed runs a world in need, apartheid on one side, apathy in another. hemisphere... That's the world! Where is the hope of sitting! Ã, [...] But, again, look at the painting in front of us. Hope! Like Hannah, the harpist looked up, some vague tones floating upward toward heaven. He dares hope... he has the courage... to make music... and praise God... on one string... he's gone!
Wright's sermon left a tremendous impression on Obama, who narrated Wright's sermon in detail in his memoirs of Dreams from My Father . Soon after Dreams From My Father was published, he entered politics, entered the Illinois Senate. In 2004 he was chosen to deliver a keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In his 2006 memoir of Obama Audacity of Hope, he recalled that when elected to deliver this speech he contemplated the topic he had previously commanded, and about the big issues that then affect this nation, before thinking about the various people he encountered while campaigning, all trying in different ways to improve their own lives and to serve their country.
It's not just the struggles of men and women who have moved me. Rather, it is their determination, their independence, their tireless optimism in the face of adversity. It reminds me of my pastor's expression, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. 'was once used in a sermon. Strength of courage... It is courage, I thought, who joined us as one person. That spirit of denying hope is what ties my own family story with a bigger American story, and my own story to the voters I want to represent.
Obama's speech, with the theme "The Audacity of Hope", was very well received. Obama was elected to the United States Senate that year, and two years later published the second volume, also titled The Audacity of Hope . Obama continued to campaign on the theme of "hope", and in his presidential campaign in 2008, his staff requested that artist Shepard Fairey change the words of the self-produced posters he created, combining Obama's image and the word progress , to read expectations . The resulting poster is then seen as an iconic image of Obama's election campaign which ultimately succeeds. Given the fascinating interest of Obama in Watts's paintings, and amid concerns over British displeasure, in the last days government historian Gordon Brown and Hunt Tristram's Labor activist suggested that Hope be moved to the White House. According to unverified reports in the Daily Mail, the offer was made but was rejected by Obama, who wanted to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following Wright's controversial remarks.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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