Ford Motors’ Touring Car (1924)

Ford Motors’ Touring Car (1924)

Twentieth Century motoring greatly expanded opportunities for picnicking by allowing anyone to enjoy the freedom of the road. Fords were ubiquitous cars, and in this advertisement, they reinforced their dominance by claiming, “Wherever you live—in town or...
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925)

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925)

Dreiser’s picnic is hellish. It’s an expression of his dark view of humanity, like Zola’s proposition that when people succumb to the “fatalities of their flesh,” they are, and a sordid picnic is the “cataclysmic” center of An...
Alexander Gerasimov’s The Boating Party (1925)

Alexander Gerasimov’s The Boating Party (1925)

The Boating Party is motivated by state-instigated propaganda to boost a failing economy and patriotic spirits. Here, Gerasimov extolls Soviet agricultural abundance during a period when it was failing. The robust women enjoy a picnic in a rowboat chock-a-block with...
Dubose Heyward’s Porgy & Bess (1926)

Dubose Heyward’s Porgy & Bess (1926)

According to Heyward, “It was the day set for the grand parade and picnic of “The Sons and Daughters of Repent Ye Saith the Lord,” and, with the first light of morning, Catfish Row had burst into a fever of preparation.” Expectations promise...

Vladimir Nabokov’s “The University Poem” (1926)

Nabokov’s “The University Poem” (1926) marks the decline of a love affair at a punting picnic on the River Cam in Cambridge. In what ought to be a happy scene of lovers on the Cam, a teem rivers full of punts bordered by tawny Gothic buildings and green lawns, and...
Laurel & Hardy’s Perfect Day (1929)

Laurel & Hardy’s Perfect Day (1929)

Laurel and Hardy’s A Perfect Day is a picnic screw-up. The day begins with smiles, but nothing goes right, and they never get far from home. The picnic is an unfulfilled dream. *Compare this with Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick A Day’s Pleasure posted...