After John Wilson’s August picnic on Grasmere Island, Dorothy Wordsworth was in good spirits. Uncharacteristically effusively, she wrote to her dear friend Catherine Clarkson, “Nineteen of us were to have dined there, and were all caught in a thunder...
John Ruskin was introduced to Turner’s works when his father gifted him with the watercolor painting Richmond Hill and Bridge, Surrey (1828). According to the British Museum, the original title of the painting was Richmond Hill and Bridge, with a Picnic Party....
Bennett added picnickers to his Niagara Falls landscape to make the vastness of the falls seem more accessible. He placed a group of picnickers on Goat Island in the left foreground and positioned the falls beyond them. The inclusion of picnickers was pleasing and...
Sandwiches in the United States are mentioned first by Frances Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans. Their contents are unknown, and they were brought along for a hellish “pic-nic” party in the woods in the environs of Cincinnati circa 1829....
Bartlett’s View from Mount Holyoke was accompanied by a text by Nathaniel P. Willis. The view is a topographical landscape, and Willis asserted that this was “Probably the richest view in America, in point of cultivation and fertile beauty.” Unknown...
The battlefield déjeuner sur l’herbe in The Three Musketeers set a pattern for sardonic picnic humor. * Dumas and Auguste Maquet (his co-author) add comic relief to the severe Siege of La Rochelle when during a lull in the battle, Athos makes a bet that he,...
Cole’s Pic-Nic Party is a standout for its joie de vivre. It’s not just another of Cole’s numerous “sylvan” scenes,” which his hyperbolic biographer Louis Noble described as being “all American, wide, bright polished water,...
Landseer’s A Dialogue at Waterloo is a portrait of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and his daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, visiting the battlefield. As the Duke describes the scene as thirty-five years before, they are accosted by a young peasant girl selling...
Leech’s joke here is the smugness of the father of the family (paterfamilias), who would rather inconvenience his family by camping on the beach instead of staying at a hotel. This large family putting up with the man is an implicit joke because no one protests...
“My first Derby,” William Powell Frith explained, “had no interest for me as a race, but as giving me the opportunity of studying life and character.” after considerable preparation, Frith eventually painted the scene as an amusement tinged...
