Matisse completed The Joy of Life [Le Bonheur de Vivre] (1905-1906), a lovers’ picnic in a garden. There is a cloth, though there is neither food nor drink. Who was it that said, “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink”? [Also see Matisse’s Calm, Luxury, and...
A pleasant picnicky scene in which Pan serenades a family. See Henri Matisse. Pastoral (1905), oil on canvas. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris. The painting was stolen in 2010 and not yet recovered.
Luxe, Calme et Volupté, or Calm, Luxury, and Sensual Pleasure, was Matisse’s shimmering beach picnic at Saint-Tropez, was a belated response to Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1864). Painted in Saint-Tropez, Matisse’s atmosphere vibrates with glowing reds,...
Sloan’s picnics are happy, and he uses the picnic theme intermittently, beginning with The Picnic Grounds, especially with South Beach Bathers (1909), The Picnic on the Ridge (1920), and Picnic, Arroyo Hondo (1938). The Picnic Grounds is a summer scene where young...
A joke is also at Norman Lindsay’s The Picnic Gods (1907) is a joke. Usually, Lindsay revels in titillation, naked buxom women, and muscular men. He took as his mission to rid Australia of its prudish sensibilities, and the content of his paintings and etchings...
Knight developed her style while at the Lamorna Art Colony in west Cornwall. She was nineteen years old and married to Harold Knight. Among more experienced artists and congenial surroundings, she realized the freedom of expression and technique that lasted...
Sloan’s diary for his outing to South Beach and the Happy Land Amusement Park is laconic: June 23, 1907: “Dolly and I went to Staten Island, South Beach this afternoon by Municipal Ferry and Train. Our first visit and we found the place to our liking. Reminds one of...
The other picnic in The Wind in the Willows is”Wayfarers All,” a somber conversation between Ratty and Sea Rat that alert readers will guess is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Here Sea Rat portrays the Ancient Mariner, whose...
Mora flourished between the 1900s and the 1930s. At the time of his death in 1940, he had lost his following and is now among the almost forgotten American painters. Featured Image: F. Luis Mora Twilight Picnic (1905 c.), oil on canvas.
Contrast Rackham’s mice with Mary Belson Elliot’s The Mice and their Pic Nic and Mickey Mouse. See Arthur Rackham. “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” Aesop’s Fables. Translated by Vernon Jones. London: Heinemann, 1912
