After living abroad for eight years, James Fenimore Cooper regarded Cooperstown’s townspeople as his social inferiors. The locals understood him to be a snob. The matter became contentious when the locals contested Cooper’s ownership of The Point, a small...
Bartlett’s View from Mount Holyoke was accompanied by a text by Nathaniel P. Willis. The view is a topographical landscape, and Willis asserted that this was “Probably the richest view in America, in point of cultivation and fertile beauty.” Unknown...
Seymour’s picnics are comic as in Unpacking for a Pic-Nic and “—A merry holiday party, forming a tolerable boat-load, and well provided with baskets of provisions, were rowing along the beautiful and picturesque banks that fringe the river’s side...
At the center of Corot’s View Near Naples is a summery rustic picnic in a grassy field above the Bay of Naples. Two couples have come for a holiday to eat, drink, sing, and dance. Despite the title’s location, the landscape is imaginary but based on...
“A Jaunt to the Looking-Glass Prairie and Back” left Dickens with mixed feelings. The weather was hot and the journey tedious, but the picnic on Looking-Glass Prairie” was something Dickens wanted, mostly because he had been told that any sightseer...
The battlefield déjeuner sur l’herbe in The Three Musketeers set a pattern for sardonic picnic humor. * Dumas and Auguste Maquet (his co-author) add comic relief to the severe Siege of La Rochelle when during a lull in the battle, Athos makes a bet that he,...
Eliza Acton’s recipe for lobster salad is contemporary with Gilbert & Sullivan’s Thespis. Lobster Salad. First, prepare a sauce with the coral of a hen lobster, pounded and rubbed through a sieve, and very gradually mixed with a good mayonnaise,...
Cole’s Pic-Nic Party is a standout for its joie de vivre. It’s not just another of Cole’s numerous “sylvan” scenes,” which his hyperbolic biographer Louis Noble described as being “all American, wide, bright polished water,...
The London Stock Exchange’s reaction to a current financial panic is the butt of John Leech’s “The Currency Question, or The Exchange Out for a Day.” Leech implies picnicking in troubled times is laughable when buying and selling stocks is as...
Knowing that any picnic might dissolve in chaos when attacked by a flying critter, readers of Punch, Britain’s premier satirical magazine, laughed at Leech’s mock tragedy. They might have also smiled patronizingly at the verbal pun “wopps,” the Cockney pronunciation...
Dumas, fils’s La Dame aux Camélias does not have a picnic episode. But Roy C. Smallwood’s Camille makes a lover’s picnic a set piece.
Brontë’s Wildfell Hall is a romantic potboiler. Helen Huntingdon, a good woman, married to an abusive man, Arthur Huntingdon, an abusive husband, runs away and takes the name, Helen Graham. At Wildfell Hall, Graham meets Gilbert Markham, who immediately falls in...
Sometime in 1798-1799, the date is unclear; Woodsworth describes a picnic in The Prelude. He does not refer to this adventure as a picnic because the word was unknown to him at this time. He probably became familiar with the word a decade later because John Wilson...
“Blissful” is Dickens’s word to describe Copperfield’s tenderest memories of Dora Spenlow’s picnic birthday party. He’s about nineteen and obsessed, getting up before 6 AM to buy flowers, so they are fresh. The picnic is near...
Landseer’s A Dialogue at Waterloo is a portrait of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and his daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, visiting the battlefield. As the Duke describes the scene as thirty-five years before, they are accosted by a young peasant girl selling...
Three couples picnic on the edge of what looks like the cliffs in Dover. The women settle the picnic cloth while the men tend the campfire. Hicks flourished during the late 1850s through the end of the century, principally as a portrait and genre painter.
When Melville and Hathorne picnicked on Mount Mansfield in August 1852, Piper Heidsieck corks were popped. That’s what Cornelius Mathews wrote The Literary World during their climb to the summit. Until this meeting, the two authors were unacquainted though they...
For whom a rainy day will not stop the picnic, Stoic Brits are the butt of Leech’s satiric humor. Visually, you see a group of umbrellas in an open field lashed by rain. The legend is, “What a nice damp place we have secured; and how very fortunate we are...
It’s unclear why Glaize selected a goûter champêtre or picnic for a portrait of his patron Alfred Bruyas. Perhaps Glaize meant to highlight Bruyas, dressed white, in a theatrical social setting as a man among many women. He spotlights his patron in the center,...
Hawthorne’s memories of Brook Farm were a childish and boisterous masquerade picnic party for a six-year-old boy. Hawthorne refused to participate and “lay under the trees and looked on.” A decade later, Hawthorne refashioned this party an unpleasant...
