Alfred Jacob Miller Breakfast at Sunrise  (1837-1867)

Alfred Jacob Miller Breakfast at Sunrise (1837-1867)

Miller’s in Breakfast at Sunrise looks picnicky, but it’s how adventurers and hunters dined in the wild. As a camp artist for Capt. William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish adventurer, Miller The hunters’ usual mess was served on a waterproof India...
Two Contrasting Views from Mount Holyoke: Thomas Cole  and William Henry Bartlett

William BartlettView from Mount Holyoke (1838c.)

Bartlett’s View from Mount Holyoke was accompanied by a text by Nathaniel P. Willis. The view is a topographical landscape, and Willis asserted that this was “Probably the richest view in America, in point of cultivation and fertile beauty.” Unknown...
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s View Near Naples  (1841)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s View Near Naples (1841)

At the center of Corot’s View Near Naples is a summery rustic picnic in a grassy field above the Bay of  Naples. Two couples have come for a holiday to eat, drink, sing, and dance. Despite the title’s location, the landscape is imaginary but based on...
Thomas Cole’s A Pic-Nic Party (1846)

Thomas Cole’s A Pic-Nic Party (1846)

Cole’s Pic-Nic Party is a standout for its joie de vivre. It’s not just another of Cole’s numerous “sylvan” scenes,” which his hyperbolic biographer Louis Noble described  as being “all American, wide, bright polished water,...
Edwin Landseer’sA Dialogue at Waterloo (1850)

Edwin Landseer’sA Dialogue at Waterloo (1850)

Landseer’s A Dialogue at Waterloo is a portrait of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and his daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, visiting the battlefield. As the Duke describes the scene as thirty-five years before, they are accosted by a young peasant girl selling...
George Elgar Hick’s Picnic on the Cliff s (1850s?)

George Elgar Hick’s Picnic on the Cliff s (1850s?)

Three couples picnic on the edge of what looks like the cliffs in Dover. The women settle the picnic cloth while the men tend the campfire. Hicks flourished during the late 1850s through the end of the century, principally as a portrait and genre painter.