Georgina Battiscombe’s 1949 English Picnics is a study of English picnics in literature and art that has become a go-to standard because it was the first of its kind. Her writing is distinctive, authoritative voice and her examples and explanations usually first-rate. Though, alas, she does not reveal her sources.
Battiscombe asserts the English picnicker “is a devotee of the simple life; for a brief moment, he apes the noble savage. Before the Romantics had made nature fashionable, no one connected the idea of pleasure with the notion of a meal eaten anywhere except under a roof.” If Battiscombe truly believed this hyperbole about going primitive, she did not follow up when selecting examples of such picnicking, many of which are contradictory to her concept of the picnicker as a noble savage.
Featured Image: Laura Knight. The Picnic (1912). Oil on Canvas. the location is probably Newlyn or Lamorna, Cornwall.
See Georgina of Battiscombe. English Picnics. London: Harvill Press,1949.