Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan has two picnics. The first is a lover’s idyll; the second is sad and deadly. When Elvira Madigan, aka Hedvig Jensen, a circus performer, and Count Sixten Sparre, a married cavalry officer, eloped, their life together was a picnic. Their...
“The Mole begged as a favour to be allowed to unpack it all by himself,” In Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1931.
Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is a French euphemism for picnic in English. Pique-nique was not used for an alfresco luncheon but for dinner indoors, repas de pique-nique. When it was exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, the painting was titled Le...
Disney’s seven-minute cartoon The Picnic packs as many picnic conventions as possible: a motorcar drive to the country, a stream, shady tree, a wicker basket, a gingham cloth jammed with a gourmand feast of sandwiches, Swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, olives, honey,...
The Pic-Nic Society was a London club devoted to theatrical entertainment, lavish dinners, and gambling. The Pic-Nics notoriety invited scandal and satire. Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra is a knock-off of James Gillray’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra. Caricatures...
Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic. The first picnic is in...
By the last count, seven directors have filmed Austen’s Emma. None of them are definitive or even alike. A list is provided as a separate entry. McGrath’s Emma is lively, and his picnic episode at Donwell Abbey and Box Hill is reasonably close to...
The picnic in Gondry’s Mood Indigo [L’Écume des jours] is his invention, a goofy addition to Boris Vian’s surrealistic novel L’Écume des jours. * It’s the love story of Colin, who is manic and unpredictable, and Chloe, who is stable until she meets...
Menander’s comedy The Bad-Tempered Man [aka Dyskolos] was lost for centuries until discovered in the 1950s. A pivotal episode is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Pan at Phyle on a hillside in what is now Athens, where a sacrificial meal will cooked to appease the...
The custom of sharing food or eranos was common among the ancient Greeks. In The Memorabilia, Xenophon discusses a dinner party at which Socrates suggests that the food and drink be collected in common stock, so there is no social discord about who brought what to...
