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...
The title of this poster for the London Underground is written in non-standard English. Establishing a picnic is almost incomprehensible unless you are a nation builder. A joke maybe? See Jean Dupas’s <em>Establish A Picnic and Pass The Day Together</em>...
Bill Clary, a native of Valentines, Virginia, for whom Dinner on the Grounds was the first Sunday of August. But other regional churches held their revival meetings on the other Sundays so that there was no competition. Clary recollected that each family had its spot...
Simkhovitch’s The Picnic is a day of leisure, but the group seems mirthless. They sit on bare earth, and each is unsmiling and subdued. There is an absence of picnic joy as a small picnic cloth is spread around which they all gather. A man in a bathing suit reclines,...
Schwartz’s evocation of a family picnic in a lush landscape. Featured Image: Family Picnic (1930s). Oil on canvas
Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Franklin’s Bullfighter from Brooklyn recall their meriendas at “La Playa,” Franklin’s camp on the Manzanares River in the summer of 1931. Franklin recalls that he had time to play because he was...
Dreiser disapproved of von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy. He argued Von Sternberg and screenwriter Samuel Hoffenstein played down the grinding forces of social and financial pressures and accentuated the love story of Clyde Griffiths’ infatuation with a wealthy...
