“Passing 50 Without Breaking the Speed Limit” is Peter Mayle’s paean to picnics. It’s a pun on the celebration of his fiftieth birthday pique-nique and not the speed limit on the twisty roads of Province in restored 19th-century caléches. Mayle...
Mann’s photograph Picnic on the Grass is a portrait of her daughter at a picnic sitting in the same pose as Victorine Meurent, the model for the nude in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Jessie at 7 shows her daughter Jesse sitting on the Grass with a plate of food: a...
Ringgold’s tapestry Tar Beach (1988) and her children’s story Tar Beach (1991) portray a classic urban rooftop picnic. When Cassie Lightfoot flies over the rooftops of Harlem, the lights of the George Washington Bridge glow against the black sky like...
Benton’s screenplay by Tom Stoppard angered E.L. Doctorow because they made too many revisions to his novel Billy Bathgate. They did, however, get Billy Bathgate’s picnic right. The picnic is a pivotal moment in Billy’s romantic education. It takes...
Despite the many jokes, it’s seldom the case, but many presume ants interrupt picnics. Deborah Gordon offers that ants rarely disrupt picnics; John O’Brien suggests maybe they do. In Ants at Work, Gordon plays down the picnic: “Indeed the observation that where there...
The Midsummer’s Day picnic is ruined when flying ants fall into the strawberries, cucumber sandwiches, and silver cream jugs. Everyone runs for cover. Belying the humor, the dying ants in e cream jugs and teacups, is Byatt’s metaphor contrasting the...
Graham’s “Picnic” is a young girl’s bitter remonstrance of a mother betrayed by a father who is a serial adulterer. The poem’s narrator, about twelve years old, has a compulsive need to retell this story of a picnic, her father’s...
Waller’s sudsy Bridges of Madison County does not include a picnic. But Clint Eastwood’s film does. Francesca (Meryl Streep) and Kincaid (Clint Eastwood) enjoy a romantic picnic by Roseman Bridge. Featured Image: The bridge is in the background. Clint Eastwood. See...
Oates’s Black Water tracks a Fourth of July picnic as it leads to the seduction of Elizabeth Anne Kelleher, a woman half age, by an unnamed Senator. “A photograph of the Senator and Kelly presents a formally posed group, but what cannot be seen is The Senator’s...
Foster’s Howards End, Ivory’s picnic reveals Edwardian hypocrisy, the inferior status of women, predatory sexuality, and the illusion of male superiority. This pivotal episode occurs when Henry Wilcox is undone by his former mistress, Jacky Bast, at a...
