Though billed as a comedy of errors, for all that happens in Bates’s “A Month by the Lake,” the lake might as well be Lake Coma. There is, however, a Bates a lovely picnic in the summer of 1937, enhancing the slow-paced relationship of the...
Brassaï’s Picnic on the Edge of the Marne is a snapshot of a group at leisure. It’s a typical picnic with mounds of food and six bottles of wine for five adults. Compare Brassaï with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne [Dimanche sur les bords de...
Abell’s The Melody That Got Lost is a surrealistic drama with music that severely critiques modern conformity to middle-class values and the insipid qualities of middle-class imagination with a picnic filled with trash. The picnic scene begins when a typically...
McCulloch-Williams’s memories of her Mammy’s cooking are the basis of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South. The pig barbecue is probably the same vintage of the Wilkes’s Twelve Oaks picnic garden as Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Her cookery...
During the first summer of FDR’s presidency, the Roosevelts hosted a Fourth of July picnic at their vacation home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick [about a half mile off the coast of Lubec, Maine]. Formality ruled, and men and women dressed in a causal style,...
Featured Image: Russell Lee. The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940). Courtesy Library of Congress. LC-USF33- 012785-M5 [P&P] Also, Dinner on the Grounds, Nell Choate Jones. Church Supper (1945) Greenville...
Sunbathing on the beach with champagne. Lartigue’s shadow is seen in the lower left corner. See Jacques Henri Lartigue. Chou Valton at the plage de la Garoupe, Cap d’Antibes, July 1932. Silver Gelatin Print.
In August 1939, Russia and Germany signed a non-aggression pact. The following October, Major Davidson-Houston was spying for the British Army, and “Siberian Picnic” is his public account of his 5,772-mile Trans-Siberian “Hard Class” train ride...
Galsworthy’s is a moral tale about the “deeply buried” guilt. What is supposed to be a romantic picnic celebrating a silver anniversary turns achingly poignant. Ashurst’s past is vividly recalled when inadvertently picnicking with his wife, Stella,...
Hoffman’s Harvest Moon Walk is a masquerade picnic where revelers dress as vegetables. According to the Griswold Museum, “Hoffman’s eccentric depiction of strangely clad figures captures one of the Lyme Art Colony’s most festive rituals. On an...
