Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864)

Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864)

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...
Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867)

Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867)

Thérèse Raquin and her lover Laurent Le Claire murder her husband Camille at a picnic. It’s a pivotal episode, proving Zola’s contention that people acting out the “fatalities of their flesh” become brutes humaines. Everything about this picnic...
Arthur Hughes’s   A Birthday Picnic (1867)

Arthur Hughes’s A Birthday Picnic (1867)

Hughes used a picnic as a theme for a family portrait of the Pattinson family. The title he gave was A Birthday Picnic – Portraits of the children of William and Anne Pattinson of Felling, near Gateshead. A red table with food in the left background, but it is...
Émile Zola’s Madeleine Férat  (1868)

Émile Zola’s Madeleine Férat (1868)

Zola’s Madeleine Férat is dedicated to Édouard Manet. Defying the critical mainstream, Zola accepted Manet’s visual realism and his frank sensualism of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, which Zola defended against adverse criticism. Zola’s...
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)

“Sunshine and laughter are good omens for a pleasure party,”  Alcott writes in Little Women. And when Laurie writes to Jo to explain his intentions, he promises sunshine and laughter. Dear Jo, What ho! Some English girls and boys are coming to see me...
James Jacques  Tissot La partie carrée (1870)

James Jacques Tissot La partie carrée (1870)

James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s La Partie carrée, aka The Foursome, is more sexually suggestive than the English title indicates.   The French title Partie Carrée suggests a sexual tryst and alludes to Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863)....
Gilbert & Sullivan’s Thespis (1872)

Gilbert & Sullivan’s Thespis (1872)

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...