hope

This is G. F. Watts's Hope (c.1885-6), on a mug.   She came from the Watts exhibition at London's Guildhall, where I went on Saturday, and she's really in a pretty bad way: sitting on a globe - the world - her eyes are bandaged, and she's trying to get some sound out of her lyre, which has only one string.   Not good.   There's a star up there, above her shoulder, but it seems very distant and out of touch.

It's perhaps rather bizarre, then, that we might not have that message on which Obama kept on - er - harping without this painting.   He heard the Reverend Jeremiah White preach on it back in 1990 - a sermon in which the Reverend described how "the harpist is sitting there in rags.   Her clothes are tattered as though she had been a victim of Hiroshima...[yet] the woman had the audacity to hope."   Obama borrowed that phrase for the title of his 2004 convention speech, and for the title of his second book.   Nelson Mandela, for that matter, had a copy of it hanging in his cell on Robben Island.

But it's such a quintessential Victorian icon!   My mother tells me that her mother had a sepia copy hanging in her bedroom (now that must have made a really cheerful picture to look at...) - together with reproductions of Landseer's Shoeing the Bay Mare, Leighton's The Return of Persephone, and a secular mother and child that I think must have been a painting by George Romney.   I still can't work out quite how she can have her left knee bent round in such an uncomfortable position, but if a painting can have a Barthian punctum, for me it's the calloused, hard worked sole of that same leg's foot.