Virgil’s details of the Trojans’ first meal in Latium, translated by Dryden among others, are that they dined at a “table on the turf,” which suggests a picnic. But Virgil surely did not want this to be a pleasant gathering, but more likely a...
It’s expected that picnics are happy. Here’s proof of how our expectations are met by five Nineteenth Century artists (and writers, too). Dora Spenlow’s birthday picnic party is probably Charles Dickens’s happiest and most romantic episode in The...
The halte de chasse has a long history predating what we think of as a picnic. Since hunting began early, at midday there was a break for a meal, un repas de chasse, which might be casual or formal. The first of these gatherings, called an assemblée by Gaston Phebus...
Featured Image: Miguel Mackinlay. Tete-a-Tête .oil on canvas. Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire, England (1930)
Featured Image: Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov. Luncheon on the Grass (2002). Centre Pompidou, Paris
Five Glum Film Picnics tells that picnics are not always. We expect picnics to be happy and vivacious, but this expectation is sometimes upended. In these instances, filmmakers depict the characters’s moodiness as exhibited at a picnic. Ordinarily, there is an...
Gilles Ménage was the first to define piquenique in his Dictionnaire de Étymologique de la Langue Françoise, published in Paris in 1694. Forty-four years earlier, when he published his Les Origines de la Langue Françoise, piquenique, then newly coined in 1649, was an...
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, is the second person to use picnic in English and spell it in a modern way. His son Philip, living in Leipzig, wrote that he attended a picnic gathering at Madame Valentin’s salon, but this 1748 letter is lost. Chesterfield...
The Courtship, Marriage, and Pic Nic Dinner of Cock Robin. To Which is Added, Alas! The Doleful Death of the Bridegroom is the first outdoor meal named a picnic in our modern sense. When John Harris retold the old story of Sparrow’s fateful murder of Cock...
Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic appeared in 1809, six years after Harris’s The Happy Courtship, Nic. It is now remembered, if at all, as the second published reference to a picnic in English. However, following the French custom of indoor dining, the...
