Wallace’s The Pale King is an unhappy novel by an unhappy author who committed suicide before completing it. As is, a picnic, without food or drink, finds Lane A. Dean, Jr. and his girlfriend Sherri, “good people,” middle-American-Christian youth,...
Bourdos’ Renoir gives you the feeling of living in Renoir’s Cagnes-sur-Mer. It’s now a suburb of Nice, but in the summer of 1915, it was the country home of Auguste Renoir. The estate Cagnes-sur mer is still extant and still holds the picnicky aura...
Wright’s Anna Karenina takes liberties by inventing a picnic that the screenplay by Tom Stoppard suggests is “a lovers’ idyll, by a stream on a warm day.” The picnic episode isn’t Tolstoy’s. As far as I know, there aren’t any...
In June 1939, FDR entertained King George VI and Queen Margaret at a picnic in Hyde Park, New York, his “other” White House. The picnic is significantly fictionalized. Michell and screenwriter Richard Nelson add much to the story but omit Eleanor...
Vogue Magazine staged an Edith Wharton picnic with photography by Annie Leibovitz and text by Colm Toibin. The picnic was photographed on the grounds of The Mount, Wharton’s home in Lennox, Massachusetts. See “The Custom of the Country: Vogue Re-creates...
The picnic scene is not Ford’s. It is the creation of White and Stoppard to demonstrate that Christopher’s excruciating relationship with Sylvia is no picnic. In episode 2 of the series, Christopher and Sylvia spend a country week with and attend a picnic on the grass...
Gilliam’s Zero Theorem is a sexy, pleasantly ordinary picnic. Except it is virtual, taking place in Qohen’s computer program and placed there by his horrid boss to make him work, work, work. The picnic is a romp on the tropical beach with a virtual sex...
Chadwick’s picnic is perfunctory and idealized. Chadwick and his screenwriter William Nicolson liked the idea of a lovers’ picnic because the narrative needed a romantic interlude. Mandela’s autobiography does not mention a picnic during his...
Wardell Milan’s Sunday, Sitting on the Bank of Butterfly Meadow (2013) is an improvisation of Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, 1938. A visual joke, yes?
Hogg says that Archipelago is a metaphor for a family just out of touch with one another; “The title relates to the family as a group of islands, linked together beneath the surface. What often links a family together goes unspoken and unacknowledged. Families are a...
