Myth was a major resource for Renaissance painters, many of whom used Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. Best known is Giovanni Bellini, the story of the gods gathering as his source for The Feast of the Gods, and Piero di Cosimo, The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths....
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, is the second person to use picnic in English and spell it in a modern way. His son Philip, living in Leipzig, wrote that he attended a picnic gathering at Madame Valentin’s salon, but this 1748 letter is lost. Chesterfield...
Unlike real-life children who are often persnickety about what is offered, fictional children at picnics take what is offered. That’s because most juvenile stories associate fun with baskets full of sweets, carbs, and fats. Presumably, well-behaved children require...
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....
Gillray’s Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802) is an important reason picnic entered English common parlance. Before Gillray, pique-nique was a trendy French word known to...
Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic appeared in 1809, six years after Harris’s The Happy Courtship, Nic. It is now remembered, if at all, as the second published reference to a picnic in English. However, following the French custom of indoor dining, the...
Corny picnic satire was in vogue among English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1871 Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. Typical “The Pic-Nic” is sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen” from Sheridan’s The...
Rousseau and Abbé Etienne Condillac dined en piquenique sometime in 1745 or 1747. The date is uncertain because Rousseau is careless with dates related to the incident twenty years after in Confessions. Hard up and living in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis, Rousseau...
Being Anglophile and aware of London happenings, Irving probably picked up the aftermath of the Pic Nic Society scandal during his tour of Europe 1804-1806. The word stuck, but it’s used only once as an adjective to mean something silly. Under the heading “Fashions by...
Homer’s A Picnic in the Woods is a pleasant joke, suggesting that the usually staid picnic might also be tumultuous. The action here is everywhere. A large picnic blanket is spread and filled with food: a bowl of fruit, a large ham with a knife for carving, a...
