When Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed by October ice in Antarctica, he and five companions set out for South Georgia Island, 800 miles away, in some of the most stormy and cold ocean on Earth. Their boat was a whaler, James Caird, barely big enough for the men...
Exuberantly ushering in the 1920s, Jowett Motor Cars, then a popular English firm, suggested that motoring provided the means to escape from work and the city: “Have you glimpsed a bit of heaven whilst “picnicing” [sic] by the scented pinewood?” Their ad shows a...
Villa America, Sara, and Gerald Murphy’s home in Antibes looked down on La Garoupe, where they spread oriental carpets on the sand and drank wine and cold Veuve Cliquot. They were prodigious drinkers, but what they ate was a mystery. During the 1920s, their home was a...
Bell often picnicked for entertainment and worked as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad) and spy. Often, the two were indistinguishable. Once using the picnic as a deception, she and her companions took an official (not identified) to a lonely...
Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” describes the Sheridan family’s Wellington, New Zealand, summer picnic garden party. The day is early summer, the weather ideal, the air warm and windless, and the blue sky has a veil of gold: “They could...
It’s a momentous picnic for a young couple to understand they are courting in Colette’s The Ripening Seed. With the summer half gone, Phil Adebert (sixteen and a half) and Vinca Ferret (fifteen and a half) pack their picnic baskets and walk down the rocky cliffs like...
The Flüela Falls picnic is staged in May, a traditional month of spiritual renewal, but in this instance, Pieter Peeperkorn plans to announce his impending suicide. Peppercorn has invited his closest friends at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos: Hans Castorp,...
Dwight’s beach scene is no picnic. It’s a crowded Coney Island scene with a humous twist. Compare Dwight’s beach scene with John Sloan’s South Beach Bathers (1908) and Reginald Marsh’s Beach Picnic (11939). Featured Image: Mable Dwight’s Coney Island...
Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed has two picnics, and I’ll treat each as a separate posting. Each picnic features the protagonist Vance Weston with different women, Halo (Héloïse) Spear on Thundertop Mountain at sunrise over the Hudson River, and Laura Lou...
Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” makes his life in 1932 seem picnicky. He remembered that brilliant day and the “Homeric feast” enthusiastically. But by the time it was published in 1937, Ford was at various times ailing and depressed,...
