Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, is the second person to use picnic in English and spell it in a modern way. His son Philip wrote that he attended a picnic gathering at Madame Valentin’s salon, but his 1748 letter is lost. His father’s letter was published...
Claude Monet The Tent, Giverny, about 1883-1886.
Antonia is the matriarch of an extended family: her daughter, child, and partner, her friends, and castoffs who need a home. Each year, a long table is set in the barnyard for the extended family to picnic. See Marleen Gorris. Antonia’s Line (1995). Screenplay by...
Allison McKenzie and Norman Page teenagers ride bicycles to a picnic on the Connecticut River. Metalious’s picnic is similar to Carson McCullers’s in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; during which Mick Kelly and Harry Minowitz talk about adult life and...
Falter was a commercial artist and illustrator mostly known for his Saturday Evening Post magazine covers. Featured Image: John Philip Falter Prairie Grove Picnic. Oil on Linen (1947)
The Devil is portrayed as a smiling horned goat enjoying a picnic with a man and two women dressed in contemporary clothing. The food is watermelon. There is a story for this picnic that is yet to unfold. Featured Image: Theodore Boyer. Luncheon with the Devil. Oil...
In picnic stories, unlike real-life children who are often persnickety, there are no arguments about food choices. Most importantly, most juvenile stories associate fun with baskets full of sweets, carbs, and fats. Presumably, well-behaved children require tasty...
Georgina Battiscombe’s 1949 English Picnics is a pioneering study of English picnics in literature and art that has become a go-to standard. Battiscombe asserts the English picnicker “is a devotee of the simple life; for a brief moment, he apes the noble savage....
Gillray’s Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802) is an important reason picnic entered English common parlance. Before Gillray, pique-nique was a trendy French word known to...
“Lives of women and children too poor to be sent to the country can now be saved in thousands of instances by making them go to the Park, During a hot day in July last, I counted at one in the park eighteen separate groups, consisting of mothers with their...
