When Christopher Robin organizes an “Expotition” to the North Pole, his friends are unsure what he means. “We are all going on an Expedition,” said Christopher Robin, as he got up and brushed himself. “Thank you, Pooh.” ”...
Except for the picnic on Monte Rosa in The Voyage Out, Woolf’s other picnic is in To the lighthouse. It’s a skimpy lunch shared by Mr. Ramsay, James, and Camas as they sail to the lighthouse. Just before reaching the island, Mr. Ramsay announces that...
Zorach’s The Picnic looks like a happy picnic. A family has motored to the country and settled on a hillside for a relaxing afternoon. In the foreground, a woman in a red sweater is reclining. Behind her, the mother, a woman in blue, is unpacking foods, a man with a...
Bradford did not see it, but Ol’ Man Adam is imbued with his inherent racism. He means to entertain by portraying rural, uneducated happy-go-lucky African Americans retelling Old Testament stories in a dialect that’s more Bradford’s than theirs....
Dwight’s beach scene is no picnic. It’s a crowded Coney Island scene with a humous twist. Compare Dwight’s beach scene with John Sloan’s South Beach Bathers (1908) and Reginald Marsh’s Beach Picnic (11939). Featured Image: Mable Dwight’s Coney Island...
Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed has two picnics, and I’ll treat each as a separate posting. Each picnic features the protagonist Vance Weston with different women, Halo (Héloïse) Spear on Thundertop Mountain at sunrise over the Hudson River, and Laura Lou...
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...
The Thundertop picnic at sunrise over the Hudson River is the first of two picnics in Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed. The other is a honeymoon picnic on an ocean beach, which I’ve treated in a separate posting. Both picnics are extended metaphors for...
Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons takes its name from the Swallow and the Amazon, two fourteen-foot dinghies that the childre n of the Walker and Blackett families sail in Coniston Lake in the English Lake District, where they play pirates and picnic at their...
Simkhovitch’s The Picnic is a day of leisure for a group that seems mirthless. They sit on bare earth, and each is unsmiling and subdued. There is no picnic joy as a small picnic cloth is spread around which they all gather. A man in a bathing suit reclines, his back...
