Samuel Pepys’ Diary (1664 & 1667)

Pepys’s “frolique” is a euphemism for a picnic, which did not exist as a word in English. It was among his favorite ways to spend an afternoon with friends idling. It was a favorite way for him to spend an afternoon with friends idling. We know this...

A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac (1780c)

Lima was a thriving major colonial town now grown into Chile’s capital and largest city with 10 million. Two centuries ago, an unidentified artist of the Lima School painted A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac, a happy picnic in which elegant aristocrats engaged...

Thomas Rowlandson’s Picturesque Studies and Scenes of Everyday Life and People (1790c.)

Rowlandson’s 1790 catalog of everyday life among the Brits includes a picnic scene. People looking at it would recognize an alfresco luncheon, but they would not have a name for it. What we call a picnic was unknown in English. Even if Brits knew the French word...

Thomas Rowlandson’s Richmond Bridge, Surrey (after 1803)

Rowlandson’s Richmond Bridge, Surrey documents a picnic party at low tide on the Thames’s sandy shore opposite Hampton Court. It was common for Londoners to hire a water taxi to transport picnicker out of the city and into the country for an afternoon of eating and...

Arthur Rackham’s Riverbank Picnic in The Wind in the Willows (1940)

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...

John Fowles’s Daniel Martin (1977)

Fowles’s notion of wrecking pleasure is an aborted picnic on the River Cherwell. Daniel Martin and Jane Mallory, two Oxford undergraduates, set out for a pleasant outing. It’s intended as an innocent date because Daniel is dating Mallory’s sister...

Anne Burgess’s Picnic by a River 1982)

Burgess’s Picnic by a River is The New Yorker’s August cover. By the side of a placid river, a mother, father, and son sit on a plate of cheese, a bowl of salad, a loaf of bread, fruits, and lemonade, Mother has a plate, and the son has a sandwich. Shoes off, they...

Mario Vargas Ilosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)

Vargas Llosa imagines Lima as a city of extremes. It’s beautiful if you “concentrate on the landscape and the birds, but it’s “ugly if you notice the piles of garbage festering as it “piles up on the outer edge of the Malecón and spills...