Trollope’s beach picnic in Can You Forgive Her (1864) is highlighted with a stern warning: “Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. Green turf is absolutely essential. There should be, if possible, rocks, old...
According to Jerrold’s satire “Picnic Reform,” British “Picnic- frequenters” must radically alter their “picnic gastronomy.” Change is accomplished by eliminating the ordinary. “Could anything be more barbarous?”...
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the...
Worrall’s “Taking and Being Taken” depicts a buffalo unsetting a photographer’s picnic. It’s a topsy-turvy moment in which the Buffalo, then being exterminated on the American Great Plains, gets even (momentarily) by disrupting a hapless...
Gibson, nature writer and artist of the 1890s, describes the nature of things in “Honey Dew Picnic” from My Studio Neighbors (1897) is, a humorous essay about the feeding frenzy of insects in a forest. He says that while he never actually witnessed the...
A joke is also at Norman Lindsay’s The Picnic Gods (1907) is a joke. Usually, Lindsay revels in titillation, naked buxom women, and muscular men. He took as his mission to rid Australia of its prudish sensibilities, and the content of his paintings and etchings...
“Le Pique-nique,” a piano composition about 30 seconds long, is one of twenty-one very short musical interpretations in Sports et Divertissement [Sports & Entertainments] devoted to the happiness of people at play. Satie’s preface explains that two artistic...
Woolf’s picnic on the summit of Monte Rosa, a fictional place in South America, is the high point (pun intended) of The Voyage Out (1915). Journeying on donkeys walking in a single file, the narrator creates the image of “a jointed caterpillar, tufted with...
Stettheimer liked whimsy and humor in her paintings but included jokes only her friends would recognize. Her outlook is surreal. She preferred the outdoors, like Picnic in Bedford Hills, because interiors are less joyful than an outdoor scene. Like Matisse’s The Red...
Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure called Charlie’s Picnic is an excursion in San Pedro harbor. It’s not a picnic, and Chaplin preferred A Day’s Pleasure as an ironic title because the story is a series of ironic misfortunes: seasickness, fistfights, and a return home that...
