The Day of the Locust may have been the best novel ever written about Hollywood, but Nathanael West and his publisher Random House miscalculated. They believed a biting satire of the film industry and its insidious confusion of illusion and reality would sell, but it...
Wolcott’s tables for St. Thomas’s Church picnic is similar to Nell Choate Jones’s 1945 Church Supper but differ from William Clary’s picnic on the grounds in Valentines, Virginia. See Marion Post Wolcott. Table in picnic grove set for St. Thomas Church supper near...
Rackham’s final project was a set of illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He was suffering from rheumatism and dying of cancer. Yet, he completed a series of twelve scenes, two of which are of Ratty and Mole’s picnic on the...
It’s unpicnicky. A Mad Tea-Party is agitated and foreboding, perhaps suggesting Fitzgerald’s unfulfilled (unrealistic) desire to become a ballet dancer. Despite the allusion to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this tea party is without humor. If Fitzgerald is Alice,...
There is a story here, but I don’t know it. See Alfred Reginald Thompson. Evening Picnic (Undated). Oil on canvas.
Hitchcock added a picnic to the screenplay of Rebecca to reveal Jack Flavell’s intention to blackmail Max De Winter for the murder of his deceased wife, Rebecca. Flavell’s disquieting revelation occurs on the day of the inquest regarding Rebecca’s...
Lee’s photograph of The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940) records a community’s religious and social life at the behest of the Farm Services Bureau. See Lee’s collection of photographs of the...
Three soldiers picnicking on the grass lookup watching antiaircraft fire. Their easy postures belie their anxiety. This jarring juxtaposition of peace and war in 1940 is Edward Ardizzone’s record of the Nazi air force lightning attacks on the English and French...
Lee’s A Family Picnic on the Fourth of July at Vale, Oregon (1941) is a photographic document of a family picnicking on the running board of their Ford. The doors are open, and Mom and Dad sit on the running boards. Children sit on the ground beside a picnic cloth....
The yellow basket and the yellow summer hat in They Arrived in Pittsburgh suggest that there will be a picnic. The grimy factory stacks spewing smoke suggest otherwise. The basket and hat symbolize the hope that in Pittsburgh (or any other industrial city), the...
