Tintagel Castle and its Arthurian associations have perennial romantic appeal—but Mary Elizabeth Braddon is the first to fictionalize a picnic on the crag, and it’s her addition to Britain’s mythology. With lunch from a local inn, Christabel Courtnay,...
Greenaway’s primer for early readers is based on a series of adventures and activities for middle-class children with illustrations by Greenaway and text by Thomas Hartford. The story for “Moll and Jane’s Picnic” is a simple recipe for a...
“People do all sorts of things at picnics” is Howells’s paradoxical foreshadowing of a love match that begins on a picnic on the rocky shore of the Bay of Fundy and then goes wrong. Though the picnickers are convivial, they mask their feelings, at...
Unlike Gustave Flaubert’s wedding party in Madame Bovary (a town about fifty miles east), where decorum is flouted, drunkenness prevails, Fourie’s agricultural bourgeoisie is well-mannered, and etiquette is etiquette observed. * This is an intentional contrast. Even...
See Theo Van Rysselberghe. The Family In The Orchard (1890). Collection State Museum Kroller-Muller,Otterlo, Netherlands
McCallister was a member of the Establishment and a paid social advisor, especially to Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, the acknowledged queen of New York society. The text’s epigram is: “One who reads this book through will have as rough a mental journey as...
Two people regard the same picnic as if from different worlds. The Deacon, a young clergyman, thinks, “My God, how nice it is! People, rocks, the fire, the twilight, a monstrous tree—nothing more, and yet how fine it is. “Laevsky, a man on the verge of a...
Toombs’s “The Undertakers’ Picnic,” a popular song of the 1890s, is doggerel: On the grass was spread a splendid dinner, Fit enough to please a saint or sinner, Not a soul of them grew any thinner When they took the...
Carroll’s picnic in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is mean-spirited. Carroll wanted to transcend Alice and get to issues of religion, society, and politics, narrated by the childish fairies Bruno (about 5) and Sylvie (about 9). “Bruno’s Picnic” and...
Renoir’s painting’s Le Repos sur l’herbe aka Resting on the Grass l’herbe is a portrait of a family at play. Renoir does not consider this a pique-nique because it is an outdoor gathering. See Pierre Auguste Renoir in Le Repos sur l’herbe and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe...
