Explore the Reception of this artwork, Hope (Watts).
Hope's dress is of a dark aërial hue, and her figure is revealed to us by a wan light from the front and the paler light of stars in the sky beyone. 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! a young woman tying herself into a knot and trying to perform the chair-trick. She is balanced on a pantomime Dutch cheese, which is floating in stage muslin of uncertain age and colour. The girl would be none the worse for a warm bath.
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".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. Watts, who saw art as a medium for moral messages, strongly disliked the doctrine of "art for art's sake", but the followers of Aestheticism greatly admired Watts's use of colour and symbolism in Hope. 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. The first platinotype reproductions of Hope were produced by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, son of Watts's close friend Julia Margaret Cameron.
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Grosvenor Gallery Theodore Child The Times platinotype Julia Margaret Cameron Aestheticism Aesthetic Movement The Fortnightly Review Claude Phillips Henry Herschel Hay Cameron retrospective exhibition Hope