Have you ever noticed that when Dorothy says, “There’s no place like home,” she’s eating a picnic lunch? Dorothy has just left Munchkin Country and is on her way to the Emerald City of Oz in the company of the Strawman. Though her meal is a...
Between 1892 and 1902, Owen Wister published stories about a man from Virginia who settled in Wyoming after the Civil War. When these were collected and published as The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains, Wister declared the Old West was dead. The popularity of his...
Loudi’s storybook for girls is about a fairy who drives three girls from their farm to new places abroad in a magical flying automobile to the pyramids of the Madeira Islands, Constantinople. Loud is an author and illustrator Many stops Constantinople, Madeira See...
“The Story of a Panic” is one of several stories Leonard Wolff complained that were “Pan-ridden.” It was well-known that Pan was code for identifying gay men and women. Woolf’s complaint implies that a Pan story such as “The Story...
Photograph of Leonid Andreyev in the English edition of The Red Laugh (1905). Andreyev’s antiwar story conjures the nightmare of Russia’s war in Manchuria. The novel is constantly morose, and each chapter is a fragment. First of which beginsAndreyev’s antiwar story...
Chief among James’s observations of Derby Day at Epsom is his astonishment at the picnicking on the carriage tops. It was a sight of madness. “The crowd was very animated; that is the most succinct description I can give of it. The horses of course had...
Matisse completed The Joy of Life [Le Bonheur de Vivre] (1905-1906), a lovers’ picnic in a garden. There is a cloth, though there is neither food nor drink. Who was it that said, “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink”? [Also see Matisse’s Calm, Luxury, and...
A pleasant picnicky scene in which Pan serenades a family. See Henri Matisse. Pastoral (1905), oil on canvas. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris. The painting was stolen in 2010 and not yet recovered.
“Miss Grace,” as Grace Margaret Gould was known among fashionistas, advocated for motorcars and picnics but stopped short at women’s suffrage. Writing for Hearst Magazine’s Motor: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to Motoring (1905), Gould puffed the “motor...
Luxe, Calme et Volupté, or Calm, Luxury, and Sensual Pleasure, was Matisse’s shimmering beach picnic at Saint-Tropez, was a belated response to Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1864). Painted in Saint-Tropez, Matisse’s atmosphere vibrates with glowing reds,...
