Later influence
Despite the steep decline in Watts's popularity, Hope continued to hold a place in popular culture, and there remained those who considered it a major work. When the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of its Watts holdings in 1954, trade unionist and left-wing M.P. Percy Collick urged "Labour stalwarts" to attend the exhibition, supposedly privately recounting that he had recently met a Viennese Jewish woman who during "the terrors of the Nazi War" had drawn "renewed faith and hope" from her photographic copy. Meanwhile, Shattered Dreams, an influential 1959 sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., took Hope as a symbol of frustrated ambition and the knowledge that few people live to see their wishes fulfilled, arguing that "shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life", and against retreating into either apathetic cynicism, a fatalistic belief in God's will or escapist fantasy in response to failure.
Myths continued to grow about supposed beliefs in the redemptive powers of Hope, and in the 1970s a rumour began spread that after Israel defeated Egypt in the Six-Day War, the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops. There is no evidence this took place, and the story is likely to stem from the fact that in early 1974, shortly after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt, the image of Hope appeared on Jordanian postage stamps. Likewise, it is regularly claimed that Nelson Mandela kept a print of Hope in his cell on Robben Island, a claim for which there is no evidence.
In 1990 Barack Obama, at the time a student at Harvard Law School, attended a sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ preached by Jeremiah Wright. Taking the Books of Samuel as a starting point, Wright explained that he had studied Watts's Hope in the 1950s, and had rediscovered the painting when Dr Frederick G. Sampson delivered a lecture on it in the late 1980s (Sampson described it as "a study in contradictions"), before discussing the image's significance in the modern world.
The painting depicts a harpist, a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits! [...] And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint tones floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope ... she has the audacity ... to make music ... and praise God ... on the one string ... she has left!
Wright's sermon left a great impression on Obama, who recounted Wright's sermon in detail in his memoir Dreams from My Father. Soon after Dreams From My Father was published he went into politics, entering the Illinois Senate. In 2004 he was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In Obama's 2006 memoir The Audacity of Hope, he recollects that on being chosen to deliver this speech, he pondered the topics on which he had previously campaigned, and on major issues then affecting the nation, before thinking about the variety of people he had met while campaigning, all endeavouring in different ways to improve their own lives and to serve their country.
It wasn't just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.' had once used in a sermon. The audacity of hope ... It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family's story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.
Obama's speech, on the theme of "The Audacity of Hope", was extremely well received. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year, and two years later published a second volume of memoirs, also titled The Audacity of Hope. Obama continued to campaign on the theme of "hope", and in his 2008 presidential campaign his staff requested that artist Shepard Fairey amend the wording of an independently produced poster he had created, combining an image of Obama and the word progress, to instead read hope. The resulting poster came to be viewed as the iconic image of Obama's ultimately successful election campaign. In light of Obama's well-known interest in Watts's painting, and amid concerns over a perceived dislike of the British, in the last days of Gordon Brown's government historian and Labour Party activist Tristram Hunt proposed that Hope be transferred to the White House. According to an unverified report in the Daily Mail, the offer was made but rejected by Obama, who wished to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following controversial remarks made by Wright.
Hope remains Watts's best known work, and formed the theme of the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano. In recognition of its continued significance, a major redevelopment of the Watts Gallery completed in 2011 was named the Hope Appeal.
