Thérèse Raquin and her lover Laurent Le Claire murder her husband Camille at a picnic. It’s a pivotal episode, proving Zola’s contention that people acting out the “fatalities of their flesh” become brutes humaines. Everything about this picnic...
Dickens vented his distaste for English travel food, especially sandwiches served in cold, comfortless train stations. The Boy at Mugby Station working in h Refreshment Room gleefully tells anyone who will listen (or not) how awful the refreshments (if they can be...
Hughes used a picnic as a theme for a family portrait of the Pattinson family. The title he gave was A Birthday Picnic – Portraits of the children of William and Anne Pattinson of Felling, near Gateshead. A red table with food in the left background, but it is...
Zola’s Madeleine Férat is dedicated to Édouard Manet. Defying the critical mainstream, Zola accepted Manet’s visual realism and his frank sensualism of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, which Zola defended against adverse criticism. Zola’s...
Haag’s Luncheon at Cairn Lochan shows the royal family picnicking in Scotland. Painted in 1868, Haag based the scene on an episode in 1861, three months before Prince Albert’s death. Yet, Haag shows the Queen dressed in her habitual black. She is accompanied by Albert...
“Sunshine and laughter are good omens for a pleasure party,” Alcott writes in Little Women. And when Laurie writes to Jo to explain his intentions, he promises sunshine and laughter. Dear Jo, What ho! Some English girls and boys are coming to see me...
When Appleton’s Journal commissioned Winslow Homer to illustrate a short essay, “Picnic Excursions,” it’s unclear if he ever read the text, partly because he titled his composition The Picnic Excursion. Perhaps he considered that picnics are...
According to Jerrold’s satire “Picnic Reform,” British “Picnic- frequenters” must radically alter their “picnic gastronomy.” Change is accomplished by eliminating the ordinary. “Could anything be more barbarous?”...
James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s La Partie carrée, aka The Foursome, is more sexually suggestive than the English title indicates. The French title Partie Carrée suggests a sexual tryst and alludes to Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863)....
Corny picnic satire was long in vogue in English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, premiered in 1871. [Posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.Com] “The Pic-Nic,” an 1829 song (sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden...
