Bennett added picnickers to his Niagara Falls landscape to make the vastness of the falls seem more accessible. He placed a group of picnickers on Goat Island in the left foreground and positioned the falls beyond them. The inclusion of picnickers was pleasing and often imitated, as Lt. Col. James Pattison Cockburn did. Twenty years later, Isabella Lucy Bird complained of picnic trash marring the view.
Featured Image: William James Bennett. Niagara Falls, The British Falls from Goat Island (1830).
*Isabella Lucy Bird’s An Englishwoman in America (1856) reports her trip to Niagara, where Bird is overpowered by the falls but later finds the place “disfigured” by picnic trash, and empty bottles of champagne and soda-water. The sublimity of the scene is trashed by errant picnickers.