George Frederick Watts

Victorian Symbolist painter George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) aimed to restore allegorical painting to British art, declaring "I paint ideas, not things." Born in London to a poor piano-maker, he was apprenticed as a sculptor at ten and admitted to Royal Academy schools at eighteen. His mother's death when he was nine and brothers' deaths in 1823 gave him a lifelong obsession with mortality that permeates his allegorical works.

His painting Hope (1886) shows a blindfolded woman on a globe, playing a lyre with only one string remaining. Mark Bills of the Watts Gallery called it "the most famous and influential" of all his paintings and "a jewel of late 19th-century Symbolism." Martin Luther King Jr. based a sermon on it in 1959; Jeremiah Wright preached on it in 1990 to a congregation that included young Barack Obama, who took "The Audacity of Hope" as his book title. Watts also painted notable portraits for his "House of Fame" project. His works influenced Picasso's Blue Period, particularly The Old Guitarist. The Tate Britain and Watts Gallery in Surrey hold major collections.