![James [Jacques]Tissot Holyday (1876c.)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/James-Jaques-Tissot.-Holyday-1109-1080x675.jpg)
The epitome of a Victorian picnic is Tissot’s Holyday. Tissot arranged a picnic of a family and friends in the garden of his home in St. John Woods. They sit beside a sparkling white cloth, china, flatware, a cake, sliced cheese on a platter, a platter of grapes, tea,...
Altamont’s The Enchanted Picnic (1882) is a sad picnic that is neither enchanted nor pleasurable. The picnicker, perhaps Doyle himself, having finished four bottles of wine and champagne, is pleasantly suffering delirium tremens. Instead of monsters, the drunk...
Unlike Gustave Flaubert’s wedding party in Madame Bovary (a town about fifty miles east), where decorum is flouted, drunkenness prevails, Fourie’s agricultural bourgeoisie is well-mannered, and etiquette is etiquette observed. * This is an intentional contrast. Even...
See Theo Van Rysselberghe. The Family In The Orchard (1890). Collection State Museum Kroller-Muller,Otterlo, Netherlands
Renoir’s painting’s Le Repos sur l’herbe aka Resting on the Grass l’herbe is a portrait of a family at play. Renoir does not consider this a pique-nique because it is an outdoor gathering. See Pierre Auguste Renoir in Le Repos sur l’herbe and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe...
Jewett’s “The Reunion” and “The End of the Feast” are episodes describing the Bowden picnic reunion in Dunnet Landing, a fictional town in Maine. The Bowdens sit at long tables in a grove of trees overlooking the sea. It’s a festive...
Larsson’s Crayfishing celebrates picnicking in late August when the crayfish are plentiful, the weather is temperate, and the days are very long. Larsson’s family scene shows the wholesomeness of family. In the immediate foreground, a child eyes the mounds of food on...
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Partie de Campagne, an 1897 lithograph, depicts a couple going off to spend a day in the country. Lautrec makes a visual pun by having a dog run behind the conveyance known as a dogcart. According to French usage of the day, Lautrec prefers...
Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Vague vaguely suggests a picnic. Escaped from France, Gauguin seemed to believe his Tahitian life was picnicky. “Everything in the landscape blinded me, dazzled me,” he wrote in the Noa Noa journal. It...
Le Pique-Nique was probably not Toulouse-Lautrec’s title because the French did not use pique-nique for such a meal. The subject is the Pierrot, the sad-sack clown, with whom Lautrec identified as a man who does not get the genuine affection of the woman he loves....
