“I really wanted to celebrate her,” she said, “at what I thought was just going to be a small and intimate birthday lunch. I envisioned it being us eating sandwiches in this cottage she was staying at. Instead, it was an extravaganza – by the way, as she deserves.” 

“To envision” is becoming a quite common alternative to the verb “to envisage”. Modern readers and speakers of British English may find it hard to credit, but this word is a new invention. It doesn’t occur in the late twentieth-century edition of the OED. It is given in Chambers without comment, defined as meaning “to see as in a vision”, though with the secondary sense of “to visualise” or “to envisage”. It’s clear that the Duchess of Sussex wasn’t using “envision” in any visionary sense – unless her sandwiches were of exceptional rarity – but in a much more general way as a synonym for “imagine”. Chambers doesn’t specifically attribute the word to the Americans, but in that sense it is definitely American (though I don’t believe the Duchess of Sussex had anything to do with its emergence). 

Aside from remarking that the new word has been adopted from American into British English with the usual phenomenal and unquestioning speed, I object to this development only on the grounds that it threatens a perfectly useful everyday word, while substituting one that, novel as it is, ought to retain its inbuilt connotation of the exceptional: with its suggestion of a revelation or perception of something wonderful, “envision” should surely be kept for contexts in which the out-of-the-ordinary is implied. 

It is justified, surely, by the context of this phrase in the Spectator (30 October 2021): “When Thomas Bodley, at the turn of the seventeenth century, envisioned a new library for Oxford University…” We can well imagine a new library for Oxford University as occurring to Bodley in the form of an inspiration or a “vision”. But I rather suspect the writer used the word as it mostly is nowadays, as an ordinary work-horse of a word, to be applied in any situation. The Duchess’s plans for “eating sandwiches in this cottage” had nothing visionary about them, but perhaps she intended to imply that they were, nonetheless, special. The “extravaganza” that appeared instead of the sandwiches obviously was. 

“To envisage” was until recently the normal English verb used to signify “to imagine” or “to bring to the mind’s eye”. Once again, I fear, I’m tempted to explain “envision” as an ignorant misunderstanding of the older word. (“Envisage” comes from the French envisager, but it’s not very old, anyway: Samuel Johnson didn’t know it. The OED’s first citation is from Keats in 1820.) The American Merriam-Webster Thesaurus gives “envision” as the primary form of the verb, recognising “envisage” as an alternative that is wholly synonymous (and by implication dispensable). I wish we could use the two verbs in ways that distinguish one from the other, with “envision” specifically applied to the marvellous or the new, something at least a little exciting. Would that be too much to envision? 

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….”after the event [a talk at a literature festival], we made our way to the signing table where half-a-dozen or so attendees were waiting for the author” – letter to The Critic, Aug/Sept 2022.

We often read of events at which those present are called “attendees”, and perhaps we’ve even used the word ourselves. But who or what, exactly, is meant by an “attendee”? The word-ending “-ee” comes from French, where “-ée” is the feminine of any adjective terminating in “é”, the past participle of many verbs having the infinitive “-er”.  So “-ee” is the word-ending of an adjective that denotes the object or recipient of an action. “Divorcee” is perhaps the most familiar example: it refers to a (female) person who is divorced, that is to say no longer married, and comes directly from the French “divorcée”, which takes as read that there exists also another person, or process, that actively performs the divorcing. 

We may compare “invitee”, which again transliterates a French word. Another term in very common use, also coming straight from the French, is “employee” where the active/passive component is clear (employer/employee). These words seem to supply the pattern on which “attendee” is formed, although “attendee” has no French equivalent. And we must note that there is no distinction between masculine and feminine endings: in English, all such words end in double-e.  

The word “attendee” didn’t appear in 20th-century editions of the OED as a derivative of the verb “to attend”, but Chambers’ 1988 edition gives it simply as a synonym for “attender”, that is to say, a person who is present at an event or occasion. It further elaborates that the event in question is an organised academic or political meeting. The term is now more widely applied and seems to have replaced “attendant”, which in the past had much the same sense, but which is now used specifically to apply to someone who performs a role in assisting or accompanying another person or group of people. (Though it can also be used as an adjective, as in “Brexit and its attendant problems”, where no particular function is implied, only the relationship.)

“Attendee” is well established now, although of fairly recent origin, and having elbowed “attendant” out of the way, does a useful job. But all said and done, “attendee” has the ring of a nonsense word, and sounds to my ears faintly comic. This is precisely because its etymology is bogus. It seems to have been concocted illogically on the lines of other words with which it has no connection, and we might start to look for other terms that have been invented on the same principle. For instance, we will (jokingly) speak of a “murderee”, meaning someone who has been murdered. I strongly suspect that “attendee” began as a joke, too, though I can’t find any acknowledgement of that in the dictionaries I’ve searched. 

Since that time, it has become an icon of German Romantic landscape, embodying many of the elements characteristic of that moment in art history. One important feature is the fact that it depicts not a solitary admirer of nature, but a small group of young people, all evidently responding to the scene before them in their own individual way, but all, also, evidently friends sharing their feelings and contributing different insights to the collective experience.  

It is significant that Friedrich often shows us two people, clearly intimate friends, opening their eyes and their minds fresh to the wonders of the world around them. The young man on the right here is a student wearing the Renaissance cap, forbidden by the authorities, of radical free-thinkers who adopted historic costume to signify their liberation from bourgeois convention. While he gazes far out to sea, the young woman points to the brilliantly white cliffs with their strangely eroded forms, while the third figure has flung himself down on the ground and peers microscopically at the grasses growing at the very lip of the precipice.

Friedrich’s tendency to use symbols in his work has encouraged commentators to elaborate many fantasies about this haunting picture. But if it is symbolic, its meaning is surely not hard to decipher.  I don’t think those little boats need to be seen as angels floating heavenwards. They are angelic enough as white sails hardly moving on a wonderfully calm blue sea. The island of Rügen lies off the north coast of Germany and provided a visitor like Friedrich, from the inland state of Saxony, with a glimpse of expanses of water that held their own mystery. And, on a still summer day must have seemed like the entrance to an eternally motionless enchantment, opening out from the shining chalk gateway of the cliffs, with their frame of delicately laced leaves and branches. 

Friendship and inward meditation are presented by Friedrich here, as in many of his landscapes, as a delicate balance, a harmonious pairing of human states: the solitary experience heightened by interaction with congenial minds, the social enriched by distancing from others. And, on another scale, the infinity of sea and sky set off against the minute detail of weeds and flowers. We may be reminded of that most solitary of the English Romantic poets, William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

It is appropriate to the season of Easter, when the Church contemplates the sufferings, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It’s a story that has been told and depicted so many times that we sometimes have difficulty seeing it with fresh eyes. Raphael reports a central episode here as an event taking place in front of us. The dead body of Jesus has been taken down from the cross, and is being carried to the sepulchre in which it will be laid – finally, as far as his grieving friends imagine. We know, of course, that the story ends quite differently. 

Although Raphael is famous for the classical dignity of his pictures, with a genius for elegantly balanced compositions and refined drawing, he could put those gifts to use in the cause of a robust, almost violent realism. We’re confronted here by a group of people in emotional and physical disarray, a disorderly crowd, it seems at first. Two of them, tense with the strain of carrying a dead body down from the hill in the background, seem to be pulled in opposite directions by the muscular effort of their exertions. Immediately beside them a woman, Mary Magdalen, is trying to get as close to the corpse as possible, in order to express her grief. Just behind, Jesus’ mother Mary is fainting into the arms of three attendants.

The calm symmetry we expect to find in Raphael’s beautifully composed scenes eludes us here. Instead, there’s an immediately obvious stress and tension in the gestures and poses of the participants. The heads don’t line up in the fashion of a portrait-group: they turn this way and that, directing our eyes abruptly towards different portions of the design.  The central figure of the dead Christ, pale and inert, its lifelessness conveyed strikingly by the dangling arm, concentrates everyone’s attention, including our own, and contrasts with the agitated and heightened emotions of the surrounding personalities. 

Only in the placid landscape beyond is there any suggestion that ideal calm can be found, and even there the hill of Golgotha with its three now empty crosses lowers under a dark cloud. The influence of the gentle, suave art of Raphael’s master, Perugino, comes through in this beautiful piece of nature-painting, but only to point up the startling realism of the figure group in the foreground: realism that was still almost unknown in Italian painting at this time. Raphael was twenty-four when he painted the picture.  

But the nineteenth-century Americans were, in reality, the true heirs to Turner and Constable, and Church took Turner’s ideas about sublimity in nature to a new level. He had the advantage of North America’s astonishing scenery, and was determined to paint it with all the rigour and discipline that John Ruskin had recommended in his famous injunction to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing”. That memorable instruction came in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which appeared in five influential volumes between 1843 and 1860. The book fell, as one American journal said, “upon the public opinion of the day like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” Church was one of the most dedicated of all Ruskin’s followers.

He made many studies of Niagara, and had already, in 1857, produced a breathtaking panoramic view of the falls from the very brim on the Canadian side. The extreme fastidious realism of his presentation makes the spectator feel actually present at the scene, experiencing the thrill and even the danger for him- or herself. Church toured these pictures both in America and in Britain, presenting them as spectacles, with “prosceniums” and viewing telescopes like theatrical events.

It is not difficult to believe while scanning this powerful canvas that we’re on a viewing platform like the precarious structure we can see at the left, dwarfed by the scale of the natural phenomenon itself, and in danger of being precipitated into the boiling foam below. The idea of the public being invited to participate to this extent in the drama of large paintings had roots in the eighteenth century, when many artists would offer visitors (for a fee) exclusive ‘private’ viewings of colossal works, often of a Biblical or apocalyptic character, but also of landscapes in the Middle East and elsewhere that were being opened up to tourism at the time.

The fashion for panoramas – 360-degree scenes where the viewer stood in the centre of a circular painting – was part of the same development, beginning in the late eighteenth century and surviving well into Church’s lifetime. Photography played a part, once it had been developed in the 1840s, and many artists, including Church, used the camera to fix their subjects and supply reference material. He based this picture of Niagara on a commercial photograph, as well as on a pencil sketch that he had made some time before.  So developing technology helped to alter the course of landscape painting, and the chain of influence passed on to the twentieth century and the spectacle of the early cinema.

Sir Richard Wallace was the illegitimate son of the 4^th Marquess of Hertford. The two men assembled a superb collection of paintings, drawings, armour and silver which Wallace’s widow bequeathed to the nation in 1900. She stipulated that no item should ever be lent.

There are famous Italian and Dutch pictures to be seen, English watercolours too, but Hertford was particularly enamoured of the French eighteenth century. This picture encapsulates the mood of the French court in the decades immediately before the French Revolution. The Wallace has plenty of pink nudes by Boucher, but as a social document, for me, this image is both more entertaining and more telling.

The very trees in this imaginary garden are conspiring to surround the figures with a rococo froufrou. When we can manage to isolate the characters from their bosky background, we see two men in light-grey suits helping a young woman to enjoy herself on a swing slung from the branches. One of them, in the background, is pulling on ropes to make her rise higher and higher, while the other, somewhat younger, is ‘ensnared with flowers’ and has fallen back so that he looks up – into the interior of her pink dress.

It’s clear that the young lady is happy to allow this to happen. Her enjoyment is such that one of her shoes has flown off, and she certainly doesn’t object to the apparently fortuitous liberty the young man is taking. She is also unconcerned, as is he, that he’s a priest in holy orders, like the man beyond – a Bishop indeed – who is encouraging both of them.

Whatever next? A young clergyman upskirting a young lady? The original title of the picture is “The Happy Accidents of the Swing”, so we are not in any doubt as to what our response should be.  Of course, in the 1760s, there was no militant feminism to assert the girl’s real interests and protect her from these predatory males.

Well, we know better now, don’t we? We still tolerate young people enjoying themselves promiscuously, when lockdown allows it. But there is a creeping puritanism abroad today that sits in judgment over quite natural human instincts. How are we to balance the conflicting demands of our new, rather curious sexual morality, and the urges to which we are all subject?

Fragonard spoke for a very different civilization. We wouldn’t wish to revert to the values of Louis XV and his court, perhaps. But this celebration of exuberance, of green and pink froufrou and youthful enjoyment, is not to be sneered at: its beauty as an image resides at least partly in the fact that it’s an icon of something in human nature I for one hope hasn’t entirely been expunged by social and political righteousness.

In 2019, the Trustees of the Wallace Collection obtained permission from the Charities Commission to lend works occasionally. So, in due course there will come, not a revolution, perhaps, but an occasional opportunity to see The Swing in places other than Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W.C.I.

The Biblical story is told in St Luke’s account of the early ministry of the Apostles: “Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the keepers before the door kept the prison. And behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell from off his hands.” (Acts 12: 6,7)

Ter Brugghen gives us the scene with absolutely no frills. The two guards are not in the picture: only the young angel, whispering his urgent instructions in the old man’s ear, one capable hand on his shoulder, the other pointing upwards over his head to Peter’s ultimate destination. His wings give off a ghostly glimmer of agitated feathers.

The only distractions from this tense interchange are the play of bright light on the angel’s shoulder and his unexpectedly rich red sleeve. Peter’s face expresses sheer terror, his hands clasped in a gesture both of distress and prayer. The angel is almost more present than the Saint himself: a down-to-earth street boy who happens to have grown near invisible wings, and knows exactly what he has to do. His certainty defeats Peter’s doubt: the fetters will drop off, and the escape be effected.

The Netherlands had recently declared their own escape, by asserting their independence from the might of Catholic Spain, in 1581. That event was confirmed by several decades of war, but very soon the newly liberated cities – Amsterdam, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden – grew into thriving commercial centres, each with its own distinct character and strengths. Their artists, too, evolved separate schools, with noticeable local characteristics. We are familiar with the “little masters” of Delft and Leiden who produced domestic scenes of great charm and intimacy: de Hoogh, Vermeer, Jan Steen, and many others. Ter Brugghen belonged to the school of Utrecht, which developed rather differently.

The city was important, large and metropolitan, and its artists were correspondingly cosmopolitan. Its population was divided fairly evenly between Protestant sects and the old Catholic belief. As far as we know, ter Brugghen adhered to the Reformed (Protestant) church. But he had been to Italy and absorbed the sophistication of the Catholic Italian masters. Much of his subject matter was taken from them. He was drawn, in particular, to the ideas of his slightly older contemporary, Caravaggio (1571-1610). It is Caravaggio whose influence we see in the powerful realism of ter Brugghen’s work, as in that of several of his Utrecht colleagues.

Caravaggio had very recently shown that even sublime religious subjects could be presented as vivid contemporary events, enacted by real, believable people, recognizable as part of our own world. The Utrecht painters took up his ideas with gusto and worked their own remarkable variations on them. Ter Brugghen was one of the most imaginative of them and could reinvent this scene from the Acts of the Apostles as a startling, indeed shocking, and also very moving episode in the life of a frightened but intrepid and inspired old man.

Their American friend the writer Gertrude Stein said of Gris: “he was very melancholy and effusive and always clear sighted and intellectual.” She also said, “as a mystic it was necessary for him to be exact… Picasso … by nature the most endowed had less clarity of intellectual purpose.”

It’s interesting that several of the most important early abstractionists were preoccupied with matters spiritual. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian was interested in Theosophy, the Englishman Ben Nicholson became a Christian Scientist. Gris was, as Stein calls him, ‘a mystic’, and it seems, in retrospect, that abstraction must coexist with a need to penetrate worlds beyond the physical and material. (Picasso, a confirmed materialist, hardly ever painted a true abstraction.)

Gris married the formal disintegration of “analytical” Cubism, as a pictorial exploration of ways to present three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane, with a logical clarity that springs from his “passion for exactitude”. This translated to a desire to create satisfying abstraction out of piecemeal representation, an impulse allied to music, in particular the music, Stein suggests, of Bach. The result was “synthetic” Cubism.

Gris wasn’t the only “synthetic” Cubist – both Picasso and Braque moved on to develop the new version at the same time, as did several others.  An important new ingredient in the new Cubism is colour (the pictures of analytical Cubism had been restricted to a palette of greys and browns. In fact, Picasso was never much of a colourist and throughout his life often preferred to work in monochrome). Gris uses colour to ravishing effect. Here he creates a lovely counterpoint of of brown, cream and blue, set off by wedges of black.

He also redeploys the fragmented elements of Cubism to make sensuous patterns, lines and planes echoing and complementing each other. The fragmented table, coffee pot, cups and saucers, spoons, eggcups and newspaper find harmonious positions in Gris’ design, where the tension between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional becomes one of the themes of a subtly integrated pattern. Gris’ Cubism is more both more beautiful and more intelligible than that of either Picasso or Braque. No wonder Juan Gris was, as Stein said, “the only person whom Picasso wished away.”

Then, in 1830, he and wife followed three of their sons to Tasmania, where they settled on a farm in the middle of the island. At the age of sixty-four Glover set up his easel once more and became the founder of the Australian school of landscape painting.

His rebirth in the Antipodes was remarkable. Rather than continuing to paint nicely balanced Claudean compositions, he reinvented himself as a vividly sensitive portrayer of the scenery of Tasmania – which could not have been more different from England’s. He saw that the ubiquitous gumtrees grow quite differently from English oaks and elms, he observed that the colour of the rocks, of the soil, is different. He painted the Aboriginal Australians with an absorbed interest in their way of life, their customs and ceremonies. He was able to send several of these glimpses of an unfamiliar world home to the Royal Academy in London. Glover died at the age of eighty-two and is buried under a large and simple slab in the centre of Tasmania.

He and his family brought to Australia an English love of gardening, which manifests itself in his charming picture of the Glovers’ home, which they had built themselves. An unpretentious, comfortable-looking Georgian house like many others in the island, it was surrounded by abundant cultivation: tree-ferns, shrubs and flowers of many kinds, all thriving under the hot Tasmanian sun. A model of industrious immigration and adjustment to a new environment. Glover’s fertile adaptation of his life and art at such a late phase of his career could surely be an inspiration to many of us.

“…The overwhelming majority of firms of all sizes in the City, including the resident Livery companies, have been able to work from home during the lockdown. This trend is likely to persist, as companies have been satisfied with how they have been able to conduct business remotely … There will also be some changes to the City’s streetscape, to provide more space for walking and cycling. This will likely include closing some streets to vehicle traffic and reallocating carriageways for pedestrians and queueing.”

Apart from its value as a comment on current life in the City of London, the passage strikes me for what may seem a obscure enough reason. In this short extract, it uses the adverb “likely” in two quite different ways, which many people will probably have no difficulty accepting. But whereas one has been with us for a long time, the other is a novelty that has suddenly gained widespread currency.

“This trend is likely to persist” uses “likely” is a way I’m quite familiar with, as an adjective, qualifying “trend”. But in the phrase: “This will likely include closing some streets …” the word is an adverb, and means “probably”. This is a usage that the Oxford English Dictionary says is “rare” except in dialect or Scots.

In fact, it’s common enough in conjunction with “very” or “most”: “She will most likely bring us a present”. But the omission of any qualifier makes for an un-British construction. We’re all quite familiar with it in that form, not as a provincialism or dialect word, but as universally common in American English.

It’s well known that American English has a powerful effect on the language spoken in these islands, and has had for two centuries or more, thanks to its energy and, often, succinctness. As for “likely”, we’ve been listening to Americans using the word in their own way for many decades, but it hasn’t penetrated deeply into the practice of British English. Until now. In the last year or so, suddenly it has become standard speech, as the Lord Mayor’s prose demonstrates so clearly.

I’ve noticed it in many other contexts, all within the last few months – the Lord Mayor is only following a new norm. I’m fascinated by the timing, and the speed, of changes like this. Can we explain why this particular use of a well-known word has broken into our standard usage so completely just at this moment?