Picnicking sandwiches and much more food play an important part in the courtship of Billy Roberts, a wagon driver, and Saxon Brown, a laundress, in Jack London’s Valley of the Moon. Intending to propose marriage, Billy and Saxon drive into the hills beyond...
Gaston Balande’s <em>Lunch on the Banks of the Seine </em> and <em>Camping</em> (1930s) Balande’s painting Déjeuner au bord de la Seine or Picnic by a River epitomizes Parisians at play along the Seine just at the start of World War I. Camping...
Claude Debussy and his daughter Claude-Emma (about ten years old) sit on a picnic carpet spread on the grass in a park. They are not dressed casually: he wears a summer suit, striped, white shirt with cufflinks, and a bow tie. He stares at wearing a summer dress,...
“The Piety And Eggs Of Paterson” is Dreiser’s version of a picnic gone wrong. It’s strategically placed at the start of A Hoosier Holiday because Dreiser meant it as a metaphor for what is to come and how his motor trip from New York to Terre...
Woolf’s picnic on the summit of Monte Rosa, a fictional place in South America, is the high point (pun intended) of The Voyage Out (1915). Journeying on donkeys walking in a single file, the narrator creates the image of “a jointed caterpillar, tufted with...
Even after zeppelin attacks on London in May and June, Brits are undeterred and cannot refrain from picnicking even under the threat of being gassed. Acid satire by F.H. Townsend. Featured Image: Even under threat of attack, Upper-class Brits cannot refrain from...
Sherrill was sure that picnic was an English word for an English custom, he ridiculed his French visitors for not spelling the word correctly. “That pleasant word “picnic,” so popular at all times in our country, “he writes, “played havoc...
Douglas’s advice to his friend, Elizabeth David, set her path to becoming a food writer while walking and picnicking in the hills above Antibes in 1940. Known as a great exaggerator, Douglas describes a mountain festival as a picnic. In his travelogue in Old...
Leyendecker’s cover for The Saturday Evening Post portrays Main Street America, and it’s meant to be good fun. It’s a ‘typical” evocation * of a family on the way to a Fourth of July Picnic (1915). Mom carries a child waving a flag, Dad,...
Larned suggests any food is picnic food as long as it can be transported. The motorcar made this wish viable, if not practical, and One Hundred Picnic Suggestions is the first cookbook dedicated to picnicking. The cover shows a picnic basket, sandwiches, and thermos...
