Potter borrowed freely from Aesop, Horace, and many other tellers of the “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,” including Mary Belson Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic Nic. “The dinner was of eight courses; not much of anything, but truly...
Mansfield was in Bandol, a sea resort in the south of France, where she hoped to regain health and stability. However, her time there was unhappy, exemplified by “Pic-Nic,” a poem hinting that her state of mind was no picnic. Perhaps because it was too dark, she...
Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure called Charlie’s Picnic is an excursion in San Pedro harbor. It’s not a picnic, and Chaplin preferred A Day’s Pleasure as an ironic title because the story is a series of ironic misfortunes: seasickness, fistfights, and a return home that...
The humor of Smith’s picnic fiasco “Slicing the Wasps” is obvious. The legend reads: “Suitable for both sexes, young and old. Fascinating, amusing, skillful exciting, and with that element of danger.” It’s also an allusion to John...
When the war began in 1914, picnic baskets were shelved. But when the peace was negotiated at Versailles in June 1919, wickers were dusted off and repacked. Signaling the change, The Illustrated London News editors suggested that it was time for picnicking—in the...
“The Ideal” is Logan Pearsall Smith’s satiric dream of the impossibility of an ideal English picnic. Smith conjectures that though he might be promised a perfect day for a picnic and feasting in the shade of splendid trees, “when, in the rainy...
Beal was an important American artist in the first half of the 20th century. He’s now almost forgotten. See Gifford Beal. The Garden Party (1920), oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
When Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed by October ice in Antarctica, he and five companions set out for South Georgia Island, 800 miles away, in some of the most stormy and cold ocean on Earth. Their boat was a whaler, James Caird, barely big enough for the men...
Exuberantly ushering in the 1920s, Jowett Motor Cars, then a popular English firm, suggested that motoring provided the means to escape from work and the city: “Have you glimpsed a bit of heaven whilst “picnicing” [sic] by the scented pinewood?” Their ad shows a...
The landscape is Kriekenput is a natural preserve in Brussels’s “blue and green network.” Featured Image: Joseph Raphael. Summer Picnic 1920. Oil on canvas.
