Painting that inspired President-elect Barack Obama

The first look at this portrait isn't the most comforting, with faded greens and gloomy greys; indeed, GK Chesterton quipped that Watts might more accurately have celled this painting "Despair".

This is President-elect Barrack Obama's favorite painting. This great portrait by visionary Victorian artist George Frederic Watts arguably set Obama on his long path to the White House.

In 1990, Obama was captivated by a sermon delivered by the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his controversial former pastor. The focus of the sermon was Hope, Watts's melancholy painting of a hunched and blindfolded girl who sits atop a globe and cautiously plucks at a single string on her crude wooden lyre. But the painting's message of faith in the face of difficulty fascinated Wright. "The harpist is sitting there in rags," he preached. "Her clothes are tattered as though she had been a victim of Hiroshima... [yet] the woman had the audacity to hope."

This phrase stuck forever in Obama's mind. He adapted it as the title of his inspiring address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. In 2006, he used it again, as the title of his second book.

Watts actually painted two versions of Hope: one hangs in Tate Britain; the other, from a private collection, went on show at London's Guildhall Art Gallery this week, as part of a substantial exhibition of Watts's work. Watts gifted his allegorical painting Love and Life to the American people. It was eventually installed in the White House on the orders of President Roosevelt.

Obama is not the only black leader to have been inspired by Hope: Nelson Mandela kept a reproduction on his wall while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Nor is Hope the only painting by Watts to have caught the eye of an American president.

The link to America's electrifying president-elect might just help to rehabilitate Watts reputation.

Source: Telegraph