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Lot Essay
Few words in the art-historian's lexicon are more tired, hackneyed and overworked than 'icon'. Any picture which has the remotest claim to be well-known or in some sense significant may find itself saddled with this cliché. Yet if one British work of art can truly be said to deserve the epithet, it is G.F. Watts's Hope. Generations were brought up on this mesmerising image in church halls and school corridors, and even today, when the old photogravures have long since been banished, it remains a potent force in the collective consciousness.
On 8 December 1885 Watts wrote to his friend Mrs Percy Wyndham: 'I am painting a picture of 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.' So much for the iconography of this famous work, which some profess to find puzzling. More than one writer, including G.K. Chesterton, has hinted that the picture might equally well be called Despair.
In the catalogue of the 1954-5 Watts exhibition, David Loshak suggested that the idea of painting Hope, one of the three Theological Virtues, was in Watts's mind from the mid-1840s, when he was living in Florence. This would not be surprising since it was a time when the artist's imagination was particularly fertile, spawning ideas that often resulted in pictures many years later. Loshak also stated that 'the first design actually executed' dated from about 1865-70, and 'was almost completely different from the later composition'. Preliminary drawings for the final design are in the Watts Gallery and elsewhere (see Wilfrid Blunt, 'England's Michelangelo', 1975, pl. 12 b); and in the late 1870s Watts made a charming oil sketch for the picture (fig. 2). Understandably, this appealed to his friend and neighbour Frederic Leighton, and Watts gave it to him as a present.
As Watts's letter to Mrs Wyndham makes clear, the first large version (private collection) was in progress by December 1885, if not earlier. According to Mrs Barrington in her Reminiscences of G.F. Watts (1905), 'a beautiful friend' of hers gave him sittings for the figure, although despite the fact that it captured 'the essence of her personality', no-one had ever 'recognised it as her portrait.' The identity of this 'beautiful friend' remains unknown. The picture was completed in time for the Grosvenor Gallery's summer exhibition of 1886, where it was much praised and admired; and it was subsequently sold to Joseph Ruston, a Lincolnshire collector who also had important examples of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Leighton and others, as well as Old Masters. After disappearing from view for many years, the picture re-surfaced at Sotheby's on 26 November 1986, an exciting rediscovery.
Much of its interest lay in comparing it with the other larger version (fig. 3), which had been in the Tate Gallery since Watts had presented it in 1897. The Tate version was one of eighteen pictures which he had given to the infant national gallery of British art in accordance with his cherished and long-held intention to paint great works of moral significance and present them to the nation. As such, it was infinitely better known than the Ruston version, and indeed the picture which had acquired such iconic status. Like the Ruston version, it dates from 1886, but whether it is entirely by Watts himself has been the subject of much debate. The seeds of doubt were sown by Mrs Barrington, who stated that it was 'an excellent replica' by Watts's assistant Cecil Schott, which Watts later 'worked on' himself. She argued that he had originally intended to give the first version to the nation, but now decided to keep the replica and sell the original. For this he had been offered £1,500, presumably by Ruston.
Watts's widow was having none of this, with its implication that her beloved 'Signor' was not above double-dealing and mercenary considerations. In her own biography of her husband (1912), she determined to set the record straight. 'Finding while (Hope) was still in the Grosvenor Gallery', she wrote, 'that it was much liked, he determined to try to repeat it, with certain changes which he believed would make it a better picture...It was because he believed (the second picture) to be the best that he reserved it for the nation, and in 1887 sold the first version.' This seems clear enough, but Mary Watts's masterstroke was to turn the tables on Mrs Barrington, whom she cordially disliked, by quoting a letter from the lady herself which seemed to contradict her own statement in the Reminiscences. 'I see in a letter to Miss Mead of 1886 that Mrs Barrington writes: "Signor has painted a second "Hope", far more beautiful than the one in the Grosvenor Gallery, and one of these he intends to give to the nation".' One feels like cheering.
Whether of not the Tate picture is partly 'studio', Watts knew what he was doing when he reserved it for the national collection. It is even debatable whether it is the 'more beautiful' picture of the two; in some ways the Ruston version is more felicitous in its handling of paint and use of colour. But Watts was not only, or indeed chiefly, concerned with beauty; he wanted his pictures to convey ideas and influence people's minds, and there is no doubt that the Tate version seizes and holds our attention in a way the other version does not. Exquisite painter though Watts can be, his real forte as an artist is his ability to evoke images, often abstract ideas in visual form, which resonate in the brain and, once seen, are never forgotten. Hope is the supreme example of this capacity.
The unique power of Hope as an image enabled G.K. Chesterton to make it the centrepiece of his brilliant analysis of Watts as an allegorist, published in the year of the artists's death, 1904. The passage is too long to quote in full, but an extract is worth giving. 'Suppose', Chesterton wrote, some visitor to an art gallery
found himself in the presence of a dim canvas with a bowed and stricken and secretive figure cowering over a broken lyre in the twilight. What would he think? His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was called Despair; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue), that it has been entered under the wrong number; this third, that the painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him - what would he see? He would see something for which there is neither speech nor language, which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before that picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy, threatens to desert them...Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed.
Much could be and has been written about the picture's art-historical and iconographical context. In both her pose and the design of her drapery, the figure reflects Watts's passionate admiration for the Elgin Marbles. He had encountered these as a boy, probably through his master, the sculptor William Behnes, and he maintained a lifetime's devotion to them, keeping casts in his studio for daily reference. As for iconographical parallels, the reader is referred to Allen Staley's account of the Tate picture in the catalogue of the Victorian High Renaissance exhibition shown at Manchester, Minneapolis and Brooklyn in 1978-9 (cat. no. 31). Staley draws comparisons not only with treatments of the theme by Watts's fellow symbolists Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, but with that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose legacy was so strong an influence on Watts's early development. Watts himself painted other pictures of the Virtues, as well as a group of Faith, Hope and Charity, but none of these has a fraction of the iconic power that we find in Hope.
It is hardly surprising that so potent an image should exist in other, subsidiary versions. Mrs Watts lists five versions in all in her invaluable manuscript catalogue of her husband's works, and this is probably not the full total, especially if we take into account such items as a large and highly finished red chalk drawing in the Watts Gallery. Some of these versions were certainly studio productions, but this was not the case with the present picture, which is not only listed by Mrs Watts but has a richly documented history and provenance.
The picture was painted in 1891 for Richard Budgett, the young widower of Ann Budgett, who had died three years earlier at the age of twenty-eight. The Budgetts were an affluent couple interested in the arts. The family fortune derived from sugar, and Richard's parents owned Stoke Park, near Guildford, not far from the village of Compton where Watts and his wife were to settle in 1891. Ann furnished her own house near Buckingham in the Aesthetic style, employing the William Morris firm, and her portrait by Millais, probably painted at the time of her marriage, had appeared at the Royal Academy in 1882. Nor were her artistic horizons confined to this country. Her sister-in-law, Sarah Budgett, was painted by Fantin-Latour, and she must have been well acquainted with the work of Giovanni Costa, who was patronised by her friend the Rev. Stopford Brooke. A liberal clergyman well known in the art world and a passionate collector of pictures, Brooke published an edition of Turner's Liber Studiorum in 1884 with Ann Budgett's help.
It may well have been through Brooke that Ann met Watts, and they were certainly in touch by the mid-1880s. Ann responded eagerly to the artist's work, including the two principal versions of Hope which were then in progress, and she wanted to buy one of his pictures herself. He offered her The Happy Warrior, then on loan to the Birmingham Art Gallery, for 300 guineas, but nothing came of this proposal. Indeed, the friendship seems to have been marked by a certain awkwardness, Watts worrying that he had responded too freely to Ann's expressions of sympathy, and Ann finding Watts too absorbed in his grandiose schemes to attend as fully as she could have wished to her overtures as a collector. It must have been daunting to receive the letter he wrote her on 13 April 1886: 'I am always pleased when anyone desires to have one of my pictures, and my immediate feeling is how much I should like to give it, but I am devoting all my time and labour and money to the production of monumental subjects bearing upon the great problems of human life and which I intend to present to the nation.' None of this, on the other hand, prevented him from asking Ann to 'come and give me a sitting for a slight study of your head...as it would be of use to me for something I am doing.'
Moreover, when Ann died in 1888, Watts was quick to offer her widower a small version of Hope, remembering, as Mary Watts put it in her manuscript catalogue, 'the admiration Mrs Budgett had expressed for this picture shortly before her death.' It is possible that he worked it up from a sketch, developing the concept in the light of the second large version, which was now complete and awaiting presentation to the national collection. There are slight variations in the disposition of the drapery and the angle of the head, but only in one important respect did Watts depart from the formula he had evolved so successfully, adding a rainbow behind the seated figure. No other version has this detail, and it was clearly intended as a symbolic reference to the death of Ann Budgett, hinting at the passage of souls from earth to heaven and the eventual mystical re-union of the young couple.
On 8 December 1885 Watts wrote to his friend Mrs Percy Wyndham: 'I am painting a picture of 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.' So much for the iconography of this famous work, which some profess to find puzzling. More than one writer, including G.K. Chesterton, has hinted that the picture might equally well be called Despair.
In the catalogue of the 1954-5 Watts exhibition, David Loshak suggested that the idea of painting Hope, one of the three Theological Virtues, was in Watts's mind from the mid-1840s, when he was living in Florence. This would not be surprising since it was a time when the artist's imagination was particularly fertile, spawning ideas that often resulted in pictures many years later. Loshak also stated that 'the first design actually executed' dated from about 1865-70, and 'was almost completely different from the later composition'. Preliminary drawings for the final design are in the Watts Gallery and elsewhere (see Wilfrid Blunt, 'England's Michelangelo', 1975, pl. 12 b); and in the late 1870s Watts made a charming oil sketch for the picture (fig. 2). Understandably, this appealed to his friend and neighbour Frederic Leighton, and Watts gave it to him as a present.
As Watts's letter to Mrs Wyndham makes clear, the first large version (private collection) was in progress by December 1885, if not earlier. According to Mrs Barrington in her Reminiscences of G.F. Watts (1905), 'a beautiful friend' of hers gave him sittings for the figure, although despite the fact that it captured 'the essence of her personality', no-one had ever 'recognised it as her portrait.' The identity of this 'beautiful friend' remains unknown. The picture was completed in time for the Grosvenor Gallery's summer exhibition of 1886, where it was much praised and admired; and it was subsequently sold to Joseph Ruston, a Lincolnshire collector who also had important examples of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Leighton and others, as well as Old Masters. After disappearing from view for many years, the picture re-surfaced at Sotheby's on 26 November 1986, an exciting rediscovery.
Much of its interest lay in comparing it with the other larger version (fig. 3), which had been in the Tate Gallery since Watts had presented it in 1897. The Tate version was one of eighteen pictures which he had given to the infant national gallery of British art in accordance with his cherished and long-held intention to paint great works of moral significance and present them to the nation. As such, it was infinitely better known than the Ruston version, and indeed the picture which had acquired such iconic status. Like the Ruston version, it dates from 1886, but whether it is entirely by Watts himself has been the subject of much debate. The seeds of doubt were sown by Mrs Barrington, who stated that it was 'an excellent replica' by Watts's assistant Cecil Schott, which Watts later 'worked on' himself. She argued that he had originally intended to give the first version to the nation, but now decided to keep the replica and sell the original. For this he had been offered £1,500, presumably by Ruston.
Watts's widow was having none of this, with its implication that her beloved 'Signor' was not above double-dealing and mercenary considerations. In her own biography of her husband (1912), she determined to set the record straight. 'Finding while (Hope) was still in the Grosvenor Gallery', she wrote, 'that it was much liked, he determined to try to repeat it, with certain changes which he believed would make it a better picture...It was because he believed (the second picture) to be the best that he reserved it for the nation, and in 1887 sold the first version.' This seems clear enough, but Mary Watts's masterstroke was to turn the tables on Mrs Barrington, whom she cordially disliked, by quoting a letter from the lady herself which seemed to contradict her own statement in the Reminiscences. 'I see in a letter to Miss Mead of 1886 that Mrs Barrington writes: "Signor has painted a second "Hope", far more beautiful than the one in the Grosvenor Gallery, and one of these he intends to give to the nation".' One feels like cheering.
Whether of not the Tate picture is partly 'studio', Watts knew what he was doing when he reserved it for the national collection. It is even debatable whether it is the 'more beautiful' picture of the two; in some ways the Ruston version is more felicitous in its handling of paint and use of colour. But Watts was not only, or indeed chiefly, concerned with beauty; he wanted his pictures to convey ideas and influence people's minds, and there is no doubt that the Tate version seizes and holds our attention in a way the other version does not. Exquisite painter though Watts can be, his real forte as an artist is his ability to evoke images, often abstract ideas in visual form, which resonate in the brain and, once seen, are never forgotten. Hope is the supreme example of this capacity.
The unique power of Hope as an image enabled G.K. Chesterton to make it the centrepiece of his brilliant analysis of Watts as an allegorist, published in the year of the artists's death, 1904. The passage is too long to quote in full, but an extract is worth giving. 'Suppose', Chesterton wrote, some visitor to an art gallery
found himself in the presence of a dim canvas with a bowed and stricken and secretive figure cowering over a broken lyre in the twilight. What would he think? His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was called Despair; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue), that it has been entered under the wrong number; this third, that the painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him - what would he see? He would see something for which there is neither speech nor language, which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before that picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy, threatens to desert them...Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed.
Much could be and has been written about the picture's art-historical and iconographical context. In both her pose and the design of her drapery, the figure reflects Watts's passionate admiration for the Elgin Marbles. He had encountered these as a boy, probably through his master, the sculptor William Behnes, and he maintained a lifetime's devotion to them, keeping casts in his studio for daily reference. As for iconographical parallels, the reader is referred to Allen Staley's account of the Tate picture in the catalogue of the Victorian High Renaissance exhibition shown at Manchester, Minneapolis and Brooklyn in 1978-9 (cat. no. 31). Staley draws comparisons not only with treatments of the theme by Watts's fellow symbolists Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, but with that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose legacy was so strong an influence on Watts's early development. Watts himself painted other pictures of the Virtues, as well as a group of Faith, Hope and Charity, but none of these has a fraction of the iconic power that we find in Hope.
It is hardly surprising that so potent an image should exist in other, subsidiary versions. Mrs Watts lists five versions in all in her invaluable manuscript catalogue of her husband's works, and this is probably not the full total, especially if we take into account such items as a large and highly finished red chalk drawing in the Watts Gallery. Some of these versions were certainly studio productions, but this was not the case with the present picture, which is not only listed by Mrs Watts but has a richly documented history and provenance.
The picture was painted in 1891 for Richard Budgett, the young widower of Ann Budgett, who had died three years earlier at the age of twenty-eight. The Budgetts were an affluent couple interested in the arts. The family fortune derived from sugar, and Richard's parents owned Stoke Park, near Guildford, not far from the village of Compton where Watts and his wife were to settle in 1891. Ann furnished her own house near Buckingham in the Aesthetic style, employing the William Morris firm, and her portrait by Millais, probably painted at the time of her marriage, had appeared at the Royal Academy in 1882. Nor were her artistic horizons confined to this country. Her sister-in-law, Sarah Budgett, was painted by Fantin-Latour, and she must have been well acquainted with the work of Giovanni Costa, who was patronised by her friend the Rev. Stopford Brooke. A liberal clergyman well known in the art world and a passionate collector of pictures, Brooke published an edition of Turner's Liber Studiorum in 1884 with Ann Budgett's help.
It may well have been through Brooke that Ann met Watts, and they were certainly in touch by the mid-1880s. Ann responded eagerly to the artist's work, including the two principal versions of Hope which were then in progress, and she wanted to buy one of his pictures herself. He offered her The Happy Warrior, then on loan to the Birmingham Art Gallery, for 300 guineas, but nothing came of this proposal. Indeed, the friendship seems to have been marked by a certain awkwardness, Watts worrying that he had responded too freely to Ann's expressions of sympathy, and Ann finding Watts too absorbed in his grandiose schemes to attend as fully as she could have wished to her overtures as a collector. It must have been daunting to receive the letter he wrote her on 13 April 1886: 'I am always pleased when anyone desires to have one of my pictures, and my immediate feeling is how much I should like to give it, but I am devoting all my time and labour and money to the production of monumental subjects bearing upon the great problems of human life and which I intend to present to the nation.' None of this, on the other hand, prevented him from asking Ann to 'come and give me a sitting for a slight study of your head...as it would be of use to me for something I am doing.'
Moreover, when Ann died in 1888, Watts was quick to offer her widower a small version of Hope, remembering, as Mary Watts put it in her manuscript catalogue, 'the admiration Mrs Budgett had expressed for this picture shortly before her death.' It is possible that he worked it up from a sketch, developing the concept in the light of the second large version, which was now complete and awaiting presentation to the national collection. There are slight variations in the disposition of the drapery and the angle of the head, but only in one important respect did Watts depart from the formula he had evolved so successfully, adding a rainbow behind the seated figure. No other version has this detail, and it was clearly intended as a symbolic reference to the death of Ann Budgett, hinting at the passage of souls from earth to heaven and the eventual mystical re-union of the young couple.