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...
Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” makes his life in 1932 seem picnicky. He remembered that brilliant day and the “Homeric feast” enthusiastically. But by the time it was published in 1937, Ford was at various times ailing and depressed,...
Rumor has it that at a studio script reading of Browning’s Freaks, Irving Thalberg, MGM’s production head, is reputed to exclaim, “I asked for something horrifying. Well, I got it.” But when Freaks was released, it failed. Unlike...
Bridge’s Peking Picnic is autofiction based on her life as the wife of the British Oriental Attaché in Peking. The romantic interlude suggests that Bridge’s real-life marriage to Owen O’Malley was no picnic. It’s the story of picnic romance...
Sample’s Church Super is his judgment of his wife Sylvia’s hometown in Westmore, Vermont. It’s dour and static. The supper is ordinary, but many details tell otherwise. Though the minister calls the picnickers for grace, many are already eating. A...
