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.

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.

[14] 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.

"[17] 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.

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.

[21] 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.

[26] 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.

[27] 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.

[28] Other works which have been suggested as possible influences on Hope include Burne-Jones's The Wheel of Fortune (c. 1870),[29][E] Albert Moore's Beads (1875),[29] Dante Gabriel Rossetti's A Sea–Spell (1877),[21] and The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder (1884).

[29] 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.

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.

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.Deary!

[37] Theodore Child of The Fortnightly Review dismissed Hope as "a ghastly and apocalyptic allegory",[38][I] while the highly regarded critic Claude Phillips considered it "an exquisite concept, insufficiently realised by a failed execution".

[39][J] Despite its initial rejection by critics, Hope proved immediately popular with many in the then-influential Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art.

[41] Soon after its exhibition poems based on the image began to be published, and platinotype reproductions—at the time the photographic process best able to capture subtle variations in tone—became popular.

[42] 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.

"[44] 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".

[58] 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.

[66] 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.

[70] 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.

[55][71] By 1904 author E. Nesbit used Hope as a symbol of poor taste in her short story The Flying Lodger,[N] 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).

"[77] 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,[71] 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.

[78] 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.

[79][80] 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.

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.

[83] 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.

[75] There is no evidence this took place, and the story 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 appeared on Jordanian postage stamps.

[48] 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 Jeremiah Wright.

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.

[94] 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.