'Hope' amid ruin: The bandaged woman, a lost granddaughter and Watts' defiant masterpiece

Huam-dong Art Museum is a long-form cultural storytelling series for the boundless digital age — the original destination for art narratives of this kind. Click ■ Subscribe to reporter■ to receive a new art story every weekend. Articles are written as storytelling grounded in historical fact, with some imaginative embellishment.

※ There is a painting I feel compelled to share, so I am breaking my silence briefly. I will return sometime in September, carrying the scent of baby formula.

By Lee Won-yul

Pandora muttered to herself. What she held was a jar. "Never open it" — those were the words of Zeus himself, king of the gods, who had handed it to her with repeated warnings. But is there anything stronger than curiosity, save perhaps love or hatred? Pandora could not resist. She told herself she would only glance inside and close it again. She turned the round stopper slowly and applied a little pressure. It came off more easily than she expected. Before she could even bring her eye to the opening, smoke began to seep out. Then — suddenly — a black mass surged upward. Through the narrow mouth it poured, endlessly: the feeling of hatred. Then envy and jealousy. Then anger and betrayal, resentment and spite. Every evil in the world that could harm humankind. Why is this here ... ? Pandora looked up as if in a trance. Darkness fell. Through it, sounds began to echo — screaming, tearing. The noise of robbery and fraud, murder and war, awakened in a world that had known only peace. "What have I done, what have I done ... " Coming to her senses too late, Pandora forced the stopper back. But the water — no, every evil — had already spilled into the world. She shook the jar. A dull thud. Something was still caught inside. Not everything had escaped. One thing had failed to get out. It was hope. It was now the only thing left for humankind to hold.

What does it mean that only hope remained? Why was it there among all the world's negations — alongside hatred and resentment — in the first place? This is a piece that examines both faces of that existence, alongside a masterwork painted in its name.

A woman sits hunched on an orange sphere.

Her eyes are covered with a bandage. She cannot see the stars or the sky. She cannot stand, let alone walk. Her tattered cloth is thin enough to reveal every curve of her body. The soles of her feet are rough in a way that breaks the heart. The background is as lonely as outer space, as boundless and bleak as the open sea. It would not be strange if everything dissolved into the mist at any moment. Yet she shows no sign of collapsing. She bows her head quietly. Beside her now is only the last remaining string of a worn-out lyre. She plucks it with care. She savors the note it produces. The vibration spreads. The sound lingers at her ear — proof that she, and this world, still exist. As long as one is alive, even like this, there is hope. Hold onto it to the very end, and perhaps someday the world will once again be painted with stars. No one can say with certainty that the probability is zero. And hope, by its nature, scatters its spores into every world where zero is not the answer.

The expectation that "tomorrow will be better."

It is this that allows the woman's world to endure one more day — today, Friday. The painting is Hope by British painter George Frederic Watts.

When Watts was conceiving Hope, the mood in British society was grim.

Britain had been sinking into economic depression since the 1870s. Impoverished farmers poured from the countryside into the cities in search of survival. But a comfortable place to settle did not simply fall from the sky. They had no choice but to wander alleys that bore no resemblance to the cities they had dreamed of. Slums gradually took root among the destitute. Some among them did well — a fortunate few managed to seize the fruits of rapid industrialization. But they were a small minority whose prominence made them visible, while the many who lived in their shadow groaned nightly before a narrow gate. The gap between rich and poor had split open like a crevasse, too wide to cross even with legs stretched to their limit. Nor was the picture any brighter beyond Britain's borders. The unified German Empire, emboldened after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, was becoming a genuine threat to British power. The United States, too, was growing at a frightening pace after concluding its Civil War between 1861 and 1865.

It was inevitable, then, that the hegemony of the so-called British Empire would begin to tremble.

The empire was delivering not light but debt and disease to many of its people. Hope, in other words, was draining away. What had seemed like a solid stone turned out to be a clump of sand — the tighter one squeezed, the more it slipped through the fingers.

Watts' personal life, meanwhile, was no easier.

In 1885 — the year he painted Hope — Watts lost his newborn granddaughter, Isabel, to illness. As with all grandparents, that small life had been an immense source of joy and comfort to him. ...Death. You again. On the day he buried the child, Watts turned over older memories. There were others he had lost before her. In 1823, when he was only six years old, two of his siblings died. Barely three years later, his mother left the world. From that point on, Watts was always conscious of death's presence. He frequently imagined his own death and reacted with heightened sensitivity to the deaths of others. The mild depression that shadowed him throughout his life was not unrelated to this.

After his granddaughter's death, Watts sent a letter to a friend containing these words. The obsessions and trauma rooted in the heart have a way of leaping effortlessly across the distance of years.

— Watts, in a letter to his acquaintance Madeline Wyndham, Dec. 1885

This was why Watts, steeped in the grief of loss, painted Hope. Was it an act of consolation — an effort to soothe the despair felt by individuals and society alike? That reading is possible. But if not that, then perhaps ... .

Returning to the myth of Pandora at this point leaves a distinctly unsettling aftertaste.

The question is one touched on briefly earlier: why was hope inside Pandora's jar alongside evils such as hatred and resentment, rather than alongside goods such as joy?

How can hope belong in the company of the negative?

Considered this way, hope is a peculiar thing. Thanks to hope, we can dream of a better tomorrow. Yet it is precisely because of hope that we cannot let go of a sorrowful today. We cling longer to suffering we might otherwise have abandoned, and return obsessively to pain we might have escaped sooner had we never known hope at all. Of course, as countless aphorisms suggest, the end of that road may bring a beautiful outcome — overcoming, victory. But when has reality ever been so accommodating? Is the world not more often a place where things do not go as planned? During Watts' active years, a philosophical current rooted in Friedrich Nietzsche's thought openly mocked hope, defining it as a negative force that spurs futile effort. Hope, in this view, could flip at any moment to reveal its dark underside — the torment of false hope. Seen in this light, Hope by Watts may strike the viewer differently on a second look. The woman in the painting may not be noble at all — she may simply be obtuse. Bandaged eyes, a broken lyre, a desolate background: everything in the canvas seems to say "please, just stop" — and yet she cannot give up, trapped by a hope that offers no way forward. What appeared to be a painting of consolation for a grief-stricken painter and a bewildered public may now read as the portrait of someone cursed, unable to let go.

Watts was a painter with a genuine feel for despair, not only hope.

Around 1850, when he was in his early thirties, he painted works including Under a Dry Arch and The Song of the Shirt. The former shows a middle-aged woman who has found nowhere left to lean, pressing her cheek against a curved arch. The latter depicts a young woman living alone, worn out by endless mending work, covering half her face with her hand. Both are strikingly realistic — as if offering a direct glimpse into the hard lives of the lower classes of that era.

The Irish Famine is more bitter still.

The work depicts the Irish Great Famine, estimated to have killed as many as 25 percent of Ireland's population of about 8 million. A gaunt young couple, seemingly without the strength to wander any further, have collapsed onto the ground. Their child cannot hold up its own head and clings only to a fold of clothing. Just behind them, someone buries their face and sobs. The pervading tones of red and yellow evoke a volcano or wildfire that could erupt or sweep through at any moment.

Then there is Found Drowned.

A woman's body has drifted beneath the arches of Waterloo Bridge. She was likely a maidservant or a laborer. She is believed to have made this final choice to escape the sexual humiliation imposed upon her and the shame that followed. Her outstretched arms and torso form, strangely, the shape of a cross. In one hand rests a locket and chain — the thing she must have treasured most throughout her life. None of it could protect her. Layers of smog and the bleak city they shroud deepen the sorrow of the scene.

The painting is also known to have been inspired by Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs." It too is a painting born of despair, depicting a landscape of despair.

Does that make the conclusion about Hope equally predictable?

Is Hope, too, simply a portrait of despair — an extension of it? "I deliberately blinded the eyes of Hope so that she would expect nothing." Watts himself once made this ambiguous remark about the painting. Before drawing a conclusion from that thread, however, one more work demands attention: Watts' After the Deluge. An orange sun charged with explosive energy bears down on the world. Storm clouds are swept away as if being punished, and the surging floodwaters are overwhelmed by red, as though about to ignite and vanish. Watts painted the scene immediately after the great flood in the story of Noah's Ark. Yet what he chose to capture is somewhat unexpected. He depicted the colors rising again after destruction had ended — life, stubbornly beginning once more. He did not paint the endless downpour. He did not transfer onto canvas the despairing image of a civilization swallowed by waves like the hand of God. "The transcendent power of light and heat pours forth to recreate the whole world. Darkness is driven away, and the waters of the earth, as if obeying a higher law, dissolve into vapor." These are the words believed to have been written by Watts himself as a description of After the Deluge. The light in the painting spreads in every direction. A cynical reading could dismiss even this radiance as nothing more than the torment of false hope — spring comes, summer follows, and then autumn must give way to a bitter winter. But the light of this moment spreads, regardless, "in spite of everything," right now.

In his comparatively younger years, Watts favored despair as a subject.

It was only in his sixties and seventies, as he entered the twilight of his life, that he began working on Hope and After the Deluge. What specific change of heart he underwent during the long years between The Irish Famine and After the Deluge cannot be known. What is certain is that he had entered a deeper season — a time more saturated, more fully ripened. Some forms of understanding arrive precisely in that way. The painter who had dissected despair more thoroughly than anyone else ultimately arrived at this: hope.

The mind returns once more to Pandora's jar.

It is true that hope and despair are separated by a single sheet of paper. It cannot be denied that faith and obsession, longing and lingering attachment, are each engraved on opposite sides of the same coin. The ancient Greeks, unable to find an answer at that boundary, must have sealed hope inside the jar. Hope cannot stand on the same ground as joy or excitement — its name notwithstanding. Yet if the world flowed only smoothly, why would hope be needed at all? If the age were simply beautiful and radiant, why would faith and longing exist? Perhaps hope itself is an emotion that blooms precisely from the soil of darker feelings. Perhaps the essence of hope is, by nature, unglamorous. Even in Watts' own time, cynical critics argued that "the woman's attempt to play music is meaningless" and proposed that the painting be retitled Despair.

This was the mocking assessment of the satirical magazine Punch at the time. And yes — the evil has been spilled, and the lyre she holds seems on the verge of breaking. But as long as a single string keeps vibrating, a single thread of hope remains valid. Like the cruciform shape in Found Drowned, like the blazing yellow and red sun in After the Deluge, it can still be a symbol of salvation.

To listen with every last ounce of strength to that faint sound.

To scatter spores, stubbornly, into every world where the probability cannot reach zero — this, when all is said and done, may be the only weapon by which human beings can survive this world with their dignity intact. It is surely for this reason that the word "audacity" always stands waiting before the word "hope." Watts himself took an ambiguous stance toward Hope, but his wife, Mary Seton, settled the matter after his death at 87 in 1904, declaring the painting "a work about faith."

In the years that followed, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Hope in his sermon "Shattered Dreams."

He argued that in the face of despair, human beings must not retreat into cynical indifference or escapist fantasy. Former US President Barack Obama has also recalled being deeply moved after encountering a sermon about Hope when he was a college student. Even earlier, there is a near-legendary account of a Jewish woman who carried a copy of the painting with her throughout World War II. And that is not all. From the moment Hope was unveiled, it brought profound comfort to the public — quite apart from whatever Watts had intended. Its popularity was such that he soon set about conceiving several more works on the same theme.

A coin tossed into the air spins and spins.

Whether hope or despair faces up when it lands cannot be known — but it is the courage to toss it again, regardless of the outcome, that makes human beings great. And is it not the case, whether by chance or by fate, that the decisive moments have always landed heads? It is for this reason that history has not sunk but continued. So, standing before Hope, let us not despair — let us hope. If a flower is destined to fall, let it bloom all the more beautifully. Every human being is capable, in themselves, of becoming something more sublime.

Bills, M., Painting for the Nation: G. F. Watts at the Tate., Watts Gallery

Hutchings, E., Discovering the Sculptures of George Frederick Watts O.M., R.A. Hunnyhill.

Obama, B., The Audacity of Hope., Canongate Books