Le Brocquy’s second wife, Anne Madden, remembers that the model in A Picnic was a friend. She preferred not to remember the woman in black and white (next to the umbrella) is Le Brocquy’s first wife, Jane Stoney. (She’s the same pensive woman in the portrait The Woman...
Rackham’s final project was a set of illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He was suffering from rheumatism and dying of cancer. Yet, he completed a series of twelve scenes, two of which are of Ratty and Mole’s picnic on the...
It’s unpicnicky. A Mad Tea-Party is agitated and foreboding, perhaps suggesting Fitzgerald’s unfulfilled (unrealistic) desire to become a ballet dancer. Despite the allusion to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this tea party is without humor. If Fitzgerald is Alice,...
There is a story here, but I don’t know it. See Alfred Reginald Thompson. Evening Picnic (Undated). Oil on canvas.
Delaney‘s paintings during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s were figurative. Over time, he shifted to abstraction during his life in Paris in the 1950s. Both The Picnic and Distant Horizons are no-food picnics. Featured Image: The Picnic. Oil on canvas....
Three soldiers picnicking on the grass lookup watching antiaircraft fire. Their easy postures belie their anxiety. This jarring juxtaposition of peace and war in 1940 is Edward Ardizzone’s record of the Nazi air force lightning attacks on the English and French...
The yellow basket and the yellow summer hat in They Arrived in Pittsburgh suggest that there will be a picnic. The grimy factory stacks spewing smoke suggest otherwise. The basket and hat symbolize the hope that in Pittsburgh (or any other industrial city), the...
Birger Ljundqvist’s Siesta Hartsena is a portrait of the artist taking a break. It has the simple appearance of a pleasant summer scene on a bluff above the sea. On the other hand, it may be more complex if the two women are the same in a different guise, one nude and...
Moynihan’s Picnic was chosen as propaganda for the British Home Front in World War Two. As a war poster, it was displayed in factories and other facilities where war workers congregated as a reminder of the peace and happiness that would prevail when the war was...
Alajálov commemorated the final year of World War II for The New Yorker (1945) magazine illustrating a coach of a passenger train filled with exhausted, sleeping soldiers and sailors, rumbling on in the dark, while a staid couple eats a picnic meal. The blasé couple...
