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...
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.
When Melville and Hathorne picnicked on Mount Mansfield in August 1852, Piper Heidsieck corks were popped. That’s what Cornelius Mathews wrote The Literary World during their climb to the summit. Until this meeting, the two authors were unacquainted though they...
For whom a rainy day will not stop the picnic, Stoic Brits are the butt of Leech’s satiric humor. Visually, you see a group of umbrellas in an open field lashed by rain. The legend is, “What a nice damp place we have secured; and how very fortunate we are...
It’s unclear why Glaize selected a goûter champêtre or picnic for a portrait of his patron Alfred Bruyas. Perhaps Glaize meant to highlight Bruyas, dressed white, in a theatrical social setting as a man among many women. He spotlights his patron in the center,...
Hawthorne’s memories of Brook Farm were a childish and boisterous masquerade picnic party for a six-year-old boy. Hawthorne refused to participate and “lay under the trees and looked on.” A decade later, Hawthorne refashioned this party an unpleasant...
Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is the story of Blithedale. On this communal farm, Mile Coverdale and Charles Hollingsworth vie for Priscilla’s affection, an ethereal waif as she seems to float rather than walk on the ground. One of Frederick...
At the Harmony Grove picnic dedicated to abolishing slavery, Thoreau read portions of what became his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts” completed later that year. The occasion was a Fourth of July celebration, and among Thoreau’s concerns was the fugitive Henry...
When Charles Dickens visited the Looking Glass Prairie in 1842, it reminded him of a Catlin exhibition in London. “The sun was going down, very red and bright,” Dickens writes, “and the prospect looked like that ruddy sketch of Catlin’s, which...
One hundred and fifty-six miles west of Cincinnati, and thirty-two years after Francis Trollope settled there, David Broderick Walcott’s Hocking Valley Picnic (1854) makes picnicking ordinary. Twenty years of picnic progress made a substantial difference in...
