Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herb (1863)

Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herb (1863)

Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is a French euphemism for picnic in English. Pique-nique was not used for an alfresco luncheon but for dinner indoors, repas de pique-nique. When it was exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, the painting was titled Le...
Walt Disney’s  The Picnic (1930)

Walt Disney’s The Picnic (1930)

Disney’s seven-minute cartoon The Picnic packs as many picnic conventions as possible: a motorcar drive to the country, a stream, shady tree, a wicker basket, a gingham cloth jammed with a gourmand feast of sandwiches, Swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, olives, honey,...
Edward Francis Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra (1802)

Edward Francis Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra (1802)

The Pic-Nic Society was a London club devoted to theatrical entertainment, lavish dinners, and gambling. The Pic-Nics notoriety invited scandal and satire. Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra is a knock-off of James Gillray’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra. Caricatures...
Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985)

Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985)

Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic. The first picnic is in...
Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996)

Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996)

By the last count, seven directors have filmed Austen’s Emma. None of them are definitive or even alike. A list is provided as a separate entry. McGrath’s Emma is lively, and his picnic episode at Donwell Abbey and Box Hill is reasonably close to...
Michel Gondry’sMood Indigo (2013)

Michel Gondry’sMood Indigo (2013)

The picnic in Gondry’s Mood Indigo [L’Écume des jours] is his invention, a goofy addition to Boris Vian’s surrealistic novel L’Écume des jours. * It’s the love story of Colin, who is manic and unpredictable, and Chloe, who is stable until she meets...
Menander’s The Bad Tempered Man (316 BCE)

Menander’s The Bad Tempered Man (316 BCE)

Menander’s comedy The Bad-Tempered Man [aka Dyskolos] was lost for centuries until discovered in the 1950s. A pivotal episode is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Pan at Phyle on a hillside in what is now Athens, where a sacrificial meal will cooked to appease the...
Philostratus’s Imagines (250-300 CE)

Philostratus’s Imagines (250-300 CE)

Hunting feasts have a long history. Among the Romans, one such by Philostratus Elder uses the rhetorical device of Ekphrasis, a verbal description of a visual representation, to illustrate a painting he observed in Naples. Ironically, none survive, if they existed at...
Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius  (before 63-65 CE)

Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius (before 63-65 CE)

Seneca says that eating ripe figs at a picnic brings “me a New Year feast every day, and I make the New Year happy and prosperous by good thoughts and greatness of soul.” Figs—only figs—that he claims is a substitute for bread. It is among the oddest main dishes for a...