Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the...
Worrall’s “Taking and Being Taken” depicts a buffalo unsetting a photographer’s picnic. It’s a topsy-turvy moment in which the Buffalo, then being exterminated on the American Great Plains, gets even (momentarily) by disrupting a hapless...
For London: A Pilgrimage, Doré and Jerrold visited Epsom in 1869 to experience the tumult of Derby-Day— the race, the carnival atmosphere, and picnic luncheons on carriage tops. Unlike William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, Dore and Jerrold were keen to exploit...
Majális is Merse’s staid Hungarian middle-class-style homage to Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’herbe. Though this is obviously a picnic, the title means “Mayfair.” Merse does not use the Hungarian loanword piknik or the expression jó s Majális zórakozás, a pleasant amusement...
Cezanne’s Picnic on a Riverbank (1873-1874) is a partie de campagne that may be a vague allusion to Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) A trio of two men and a woman congregate on the riverbank. The woman sits alone, hat off, her parasol between her legs....
Carroll upends beach picnic expectations in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Still, its tenor is darkly mocking, qualities evident in Tweedledee’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” Of course, everyone laughs at the silly...
Long forgotten, Austin’s Stumps, A Story for Children story, oozes Victorian social pedagogy and standard comfort food. Austin’s audience loved Stumps, aka Cecily, a bratty four-year-old brat loved for her lisping mispronunciations, especially...
Garcia Mencia’s middle-class picnickers have out to the country for afternoon lunch. They are well provisioned. Compare Garica Mencía’s La merienda with Pál Szinyei Merse’s Majális (1873). See Antonio Garcia Mencía. La Merienda (1874). Oil on...
Ford’s painting At Hanging Rock of sightseers picnicking is an inspiration to Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). The picnickers are middle class and dressed in everyday clothing that is ill-suited to the country locale. They walk, converse, read, and...
Becky Sharp’s “pic-nic” begins with “a giddy and rollicking company” on an island in the Mississippi. After traveling by old ferryboat three miles below the town of Hannibal, the picnickers “swarmed ashore and soon the forest distances and craggy heights echoed...
