In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting Flaming June, which also depicted Dorothy Dene, on the composition of Watts's Hope.
Flaming June kept the central figure's pose, but showing her as relaxed and sleeping.
Dene had worked closely with Leighton since the 1880s, and was left the then huge sum of £5000 (about £600,000 in 2020 terms) in Leighton's will when he died the following year.
By this time, Hope was becoming an icon of English popular culture, propelled by the wide distribution of reproductions; in 1898, a year after the opening of the Tate Gallery, its director noted that Hope was one of the two most popular works in their collection among students.

As the 20th century began, the increasingly influential Modernist movement drew its inspiration from Paul Cézanne and had little regard for 19th-century British painting.
Watts drew particular dislike from English critics, and Hope came to be seen as a passing fad, emblematic of the excessive sentimentality and poor taste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
By 1904 author E. Nesbit used Hope as a symbol of poor taste in her short story The Flying Lodger, describing it as "a blind girl sitting on an orange", a description which would later be popularised by Agatha Christie in her 1942 novel Five Little Pigs (also known as Murder in Retrospect).

Although Watts's work was seen as outdated and sentimental by the English Modernist movement, his experimentation with Symbolism and Expressionism drew respect from the European Modernists, notably the young Pablo Picasso, who echoed Hope's intentionally distorted features and broad sweeps of blue in The Old Guitarist (1903–1904).
Despite Watts's fading reputation at home, by the time of his death in 1904 Hope had become a globally recognised image.
Reproductions circulated in cultures as diverse as Japan, Australia and Poland, and Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, displayed a reproduction in his Summer White House at Sagamore Hill.
By 1916, Hope was well known enough in the United States that the stage directions for Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel explicitly use the addition of a copy of Hope to the set to suggest improvements to the home over the passage of time.

Some were beginning to see it as embodying sentimentality and bad taste, but Hope continued to remain popular with the English public.
In 1905 The Strand Magazine noted that it was the most popular picture in the Tate Gallery, and remarked that "there are few print-sellers who fail to exhibit it in their windows."
After Watts's death the Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the rights to make carbon print copies of Hope, making reproductions of the image affordable for poorer households, and in 1908 engraver Emery Walker began to sell full-colour photogravure prints of Hope, the first publicly available high-quality colour reproductions of the image.

In 1922 the American film Hope, directed by Legaren à Hiller and starring Mary Astor and Ralph Faulkner, was based on the imagined origins of the painting.
In it Joan, a fisherman's wife, is treated poorly by the rest of her village in her husband's absence, and has only the hope of his return to cling to.
His ship returns but bursts into flames, before he is washed up safe and well on shore.
The story is interspersed with scenes of Watts explaining the story to a model, and with stills of the painting.
By the time the film was released, the fad for prints of Hope was long over, to the extent that references to it had become verbal shorthand for authors and artists wanting to indicate that a scene was set in the 1900s–1910s.
Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery removed their collection of Watts's works from permanent display.
In 1895 Frederic Leighton based his painting Flaming June, which also depicted Dorothy Dene, on the composition of Watts's Hope. Flaming June kept the central figure's pose, but showing her as relaxed and sleeping. Dene had worked closely with Leighton since the 1880s, and was left the then huge sum of £5000 (about £600,000 in 2020 terms) in Leighton's will when he died the following year. By this time, Hope was becoming an icon of English popular culture, propelled by the wide distribution of reproductions; in 1898, a year after the opening of the Tate Gallery, its director noted that Hope was one of the two most popular works in their collection among students.
As the 20th century began, the increasingly influential Modernist movement drew its inspiration from Paul Cézanne and had little regard for 19th-century British painting. Watts drew particular dislike from English critics, and Hope came to be seen as a passing fad, emblematic of the excessive sentimentality and poor taste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1904 author E. Nesbit used Hope as a symbol of poor taste in her short story The Flying Lodger, describing it as "a blind girl sitting on an orange", a description which would later be popularised by Agatha Christie in her 1942 novel Five Little Pigs (also known as Murder in Retrospect).
Although Watts's work was seen as outdated and sentimental by the English Modernist movement, his experimentation with Symbolism and Expressionism drew respect from the European Modernists, notably the young Pablo Picasso, who echoed Hope's intentionally distorted features and broad sweeps of blue in The Old Guitarist (1903–1904). Despite Watts's fading reputation at home, by the time of his death in 1904 Hope had become a globally recognised image. Reproductions circulated in cultures as diverse as Japan, Australia and Poland, and Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, displayed a reproduction in his Summer White House at Sagamore Hill. By 1916, Hope was well known enough in the United States that the stage directions for Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel explicitly use the addition of a copy of Hope to the set to suggest improvements to the home over the passage of time.
Some were beginning to see it as embodying sentimentality and bad taste, but Hope continued to remain popular with the English public. In 1905 The Strand Magazine noted that it was the most popular picture in the Tate Gallery, and remarked that "there are few print-sellers who fail to exhibit it in their windows." After Watts's death the Autotype Company purchased from Mary Seton Watts the rights to make carbon print copies of Hope, making reproductions of the image affordable for poorer households, and in 1908 engraver Emery Walker began to sell full-colour photogravure prints of Hope, the first publicly available high-quality colour reproductions of the image.
In 1922 the American film Hope, directed by Legaren à Hiller and starring Mary Astor and Ralph Faulkner, was based on the imagined origins of the painting. In it Joan, a fisherman's wife, is treated poorly by the rest of her village in her husband's absence, and has only the hope of his return to cling to. His ship returns but bursts into flames, before he is washed up safe and well on shore. The story is interspersed with scenes of Watts explaining the story to a model, and with stills of the painting. By the time the film was released, the fad for prints of Hope was long over, to the extent that references to it had become verbal shorthand for authors and artists wanting to indicate that a scene was set in the 1900s–1910s. Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery removed their collection of Watts's works from permanent display.
Hope (painting)