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 Madox Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” makes his life in 1932 seem picnicky. Particularly, Ford remembered a picnic on a brilliant day that he “Homeric feast” enthusiastically. But by the time it was published in 1937, Ford was at...
Deim’s The Beach Picnic is a portrait of the Cannery Row crowd in Monterey, California. Among the picnickers are John Steinbeck, the kneeling figure lighting the fire, Ed Rickets (bearded) and reclining with a beer in hand, Deim playing the guitar, who looks down at...
At first, Donald Duck’s beach picnic is a pleasant outing. Donald and Pluto set up on the beach for a perfect day. Donald plants an umbrella for shade and spreads a blanket for food. Expectations are high. It doesn’t last, as usual. The picnic turmoil is classic....
Arriving at Twelve Oakes, Gerald O’Hara is pleased to say, “Well, John Wilkes, it’s a grand day you’ll be havin’ for the barbecue.” It’s momentous because it is the beginning of Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s relationship and the engagement party for...
This is a favorite among Marsh’s Coney Island images. In this instance, a collection of Venuses. Compare it with John Sloan’s South Beach Bathers and Mabel Dwight’s Coney Island Beach. Featured Image: Beach Picnic (1939). Engraving.
Rackham’s final project was a set of illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He was suffering from rheumatism and dying of cancer. Yet, he completed a series of twelve scenes, two of which are of Ratty and Mole’s picnic on the...
Only 2:07 seconds of screen time, but it’s an unpleasant crackling picnic that ends with a slap in the face. Despite the southern Florida heat, Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander are lounging by a crackling fireplace in Xanadu, their palatial estate: he in...
