Featured Image: John Philip Falter Prairie Grove Picnic. Oil on Linen (1977)
Picnics Illustrated is a chronological history of visual picnics in art and film. PicnicWit provides a comprehensive but not exhaustive collection of examples from various sources from literature, fine arts, film, music, dance, journalism, and cookbooks. Both...
When audiences laughed at the pedant Vadius in Molière’s The Learned Ladies (1672), those in the know recognized Ménage shouting at a rival, “I defy you in verse, prose, Greek, and Latin.” When audiences laughed at the pedant Vadius in...
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, is the second person to use picnic in English and spell it in a modern way. His son Philip wrote that he attended a picnic gathering at Madame Valentin’s salon, but his 1748 letter is lost. His father’s letter is not and was...
Picnickers will be satisfied only with “a perfect day for a picnic.” Spring or summer is preferred, but any season will do. Outdoors is preferred to the indoors, anywhere – on land or a sea, in backyards or parks, on beaches or rooftops—wherever a space...
Gillray’s Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802) is an important reason picnic entered English common parlance. Before Gillray, pique-nique was a trendy French word known to...
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...
Hiroshige aims to depict activity relevant to the moment in a specific landscape. In this respect, his scenes in Japan correlate with J.M.W. Turner’s picturesque landscapes of the United Kingdom. While picnicking under the blooming cherry trees at Gotenyama, too...
Lubbock’s Portrait of Edith Wharton is definitive: “Edith settled, the strapped hampers (which she likes to think of as ‘corded bales’) set side by side, the rugs spread, the guests ‘star-scattered in their places: poetic allusion is never amiss at these symposia....
Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination, is a satire of American Methodism. The narrative explores the mid-life crisis of Theron Ware, a married Methodist Episcopal pastor who falls for Celia Madden, an Irish Catholic, in a small town in New...
