.M. Forster’s narrator calls the outcome of this picnic a “social contretemps.” Due to George Emmerson’s exuberance and Lucy Honeychurch’s reticence. He associates the perplexity to the presence of Pan, the god of chaos: Some complicated game had been playing up and down the hillside all the afternoon. What it was and exactly how the […] read more

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. read more

“The Story of a Panic” is one of several stories that Leonard Wolff complained 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 of a Panic” gave Forster’s private life away. “The Story of a Picnic” is about […] read more

When Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and his wife Lucrezia Borgia asked for a painting expressing worldly delights, drinking, and sensuality, Giovanni Bellini could not refuse the offer, though he was eighty-five and in failing health. The Feast of the Gods [Il festino degli dei] is an illustration of one of Ovid’s many Priapic […] read more

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Édouard  Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe share the same title, nothing more. Importantly, Renoir’s picnics, there are two of them, are comic jabs at Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, which does not have a picnic. According to Huxley, scientific rationalism defeats human passion, but Renoir rejects rationalism. Renoir […] read more

Frederick Ashton’s Picnic at Tintagel is inspired by  Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s popular Victorian novel Royal Mount, where sightseers picnic on Tintagel Castle’s ruins. (Discussion of Braddon’s Royal Mount is posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.com) Ashton famed the narrative by contrasting the story of Tristan Isolde, retold in two timeframes, one Edwardian and the other in the Dark Ages. As […] read more

Hercules Protecting the Balance Between Pleasure and Virtue is Legare’s allusion to Albrecht Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads (1498c). But what Dürer implies, Ligare makes emphatic. His essential change is the picnic. He shows no food; instead, Ligare places Pleasure on a blue cloth next to a basket of apples. The scene evokes Pleasure and […] read more

Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates (371BCE) tells that when Hercules was approaching manhood, he was given a choice of a life of pleasure or a life of Virtue. While sitting at a crossroads and considering his future, he is approached by two immortal women, Virtue, in a white robe, and Vice, in a transparent robe revealing […] read more

Piero’s primary resource is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XII). Ovid does not mention the wedding guests dining alfresco in a picnic style. But Piero prominently depicts a white embroidered picnic cloth in the center of the composition. In other details, Piero is faithful to Ovid’s narrative. He situates the feast in the open and not in a […] read more