When Appleton’s Journal commissioned Winslow Homer to illustrate a short essay, “Picnic Excursions,” it’s unclear if he ever read the text, partly because he titled his composition The Picnic Excursion. Perhaps he considered that picnics are pretty much the same.
Nevertheless, Homer captures the sense of the event as a group of men and women are boarding their wagons and about to set out for a day in the country that the anonymous author of the text says is the freedom to get outdoors the better to “to eat, to chat, to lie, to talk, to walk, with something of the unconstraint of primitive life. We find a fascination in carrying back our civilization to the wilderness.” 
Homer’s picnickers are anything but primitive, well-dressed women and men who might be surprised to think themselves anything but genteel. The moment Homer selects curiously suggests a sly joke, for the man beside the basket has taken a bottle of wine and is readying to open it. The women beside him seem to be disapproving that the picnic drinking begins before the picnic. The small terrier, resting nearby, agrees–and looks askance. His prominence may be an implicit argument for temperance, though Homer was fond of rum. However, in “Picnic Excursions,” author prefers iced claret to accompany the cold chicken.
The identity of this connoisseur of picnics is unknown.
Featured Image: Winslow Homer. The Picnic Excursion (1869), woodblock engraving. In Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, New York: August 14, 1869. Scan courtesy of Jonathan Blair
See Winslow Homer. The Picnic Excursion (1869), woodblock engraving. In Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, New York: August 14, 1869. 1, no. 20. The unsigned essay “Picnic Excursions.” appears on page 625.