An exhibition at the Watts Gallery considers the potential – and limits – of art as a force for social change

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama traced a turning point in his life to a sermon he heard in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, the year he entered law school. In the sermon the Revd Jeremiah Wright described a painting of a blindfolded woman sitting on a globe bent over a broken lyre with a single string, “a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens … She dares to hope.” The idea that hope needed only one string was a game-changer that turned a young mixed-heritage law student into a future president.

The picture in question, titled Hope (1886), was painted by the Victorian Symbolist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), who explained its meaning: “It is only when one supreme desire is left that one reaches the topmost pitch of hope.” Watts’ supreme desire was to create a British art of high seriousness emulating the grandeur of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in the service of a universal vision of human progress. But the high art ideals the young Watts had the leisure to cultivate during four idyllic years in Italy in the 1840s took a serious knock when the young artist returned home to London in 1847 to find his country in the grip of the “Hungry Forties”.