Homage to Gauguin is an allusion da Vinci’s Last Supper. Instead of Jesus, Gauguin is seated (third from right) with his friends and admirers. A picnic feast ought to be jolly, but these picnickers are solemn and unhappy. The images and colors all related to...
Harland’s Brunswick Stew in Common Sense in the Household (1871) Brunswick Stew is a thick tomato-based stew usually made with lima or butter beans, okra, corn, and meats such as beef, pork, chicken, or squirrel. In Harland believes the stew is named after New...
Atkinson’s satirizes a Sunday School outing by making it a continuous set of missteps that leave the three Lennox children, Clifford, Babs, and Bunty, in such a rush to the train station that only two of them make it. The problem is that Nell Lennox, their...
During the first summer of FDR’s presidency, the Roosevelts hosted a Fourth of July picnic at their vacation home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick [about a half mile off the coast of Lubec, Maine]. Formality ruled, and men and women dressed in a causal style,...
The second oldest African American cookbook is Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Etc. She does not mention picnics in her text, but fried chicken is a picnic staple. Fried Chicken: Cut the chicken up, separating every...
Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook is mainly a collection of high calory, sugary and fatty foods. She starts with Burnet’s essential food path and never wanders far off. “You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner,”...
Featured Image: Russell Lee. The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940). Courtesy Library of Congress. LC-USF33- 012785-M5 [P&P] Also, Dinner on the Grounds, Nell Choate Jones. Church Supper (1945) Greenville...
Bergman’s picnics in The Seventh Seal [Det Sjunde Inseglet], are moments of relief in an otherwise deadly serious drama about death and the meaning of God. When Block interrupts his game of chess with Death, he joins Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson)...
Sunbathing on the beach with champagne. Lartigue’s shadow is seen in the lower left corner. See Jacques Henri Lartigue. Chou Valton at the plage de la Garoupe, Cap d’Antibes, July 1932. Silver Gelatin Print.
Wunderlich’s Das Frühstuck im Grünen [Luncheon on the Grass] is a surrealistic adaptation of both Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Sensuality, sex, and any semblance of pleasantries are absent. Distorted, seemingly unhappy, figures sit in a barren landscape....
