When Appleton’s Journal commissioned Winslow Homer to illustrate a short essay, “Picnic Excursions,” it’s unclear if he ever read the text, partly because he titled his composition The Picnic Excursion. Perhaps he considered that picnics are...
According to Jerrold’s satire “Picnic Reform,” British “Picnic- frequenters” must radically alter their “picnic gastronomy.” Change is accomplished by eliminating the ordinary. “Could anything be more barbarous?”...
James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s La Partie carrée, aka The Foursome, is more sexually suggestive than the English title indicates. The French title Partie Carrée suggests a sexual tryst and alludes to Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863)....
Corny picnic satire was long in vogue in English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, premiered in 1871. [Posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.Com] “The Pic-Nic,” an 1829 song (sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden...
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the...
Worrall’s “Taking and Being Taken” depicts a buffalo unsetting a photographer’s picnic. It’s a topsy-turvy moment in which the Buffalo, then being exterminated on the American Great Plains, gets even (momentarily) by disrupting a hapless...
For London: A Pilgrimage, Doré and Jerrold visited Epsom in 1869 to experience the tumult of Derby-Day— the race, the carnival atmosphere, and picnic luncheons on carriage tops. Unlike William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, Dore and Jerrold were keen to exploit...
Majális is Merse’s staid Hungarian middle-class-style homage to Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’herbe. Though this is obviously a picnic, the title means “Mayfair.” Merse does not use the Hungarian loanword piknik or the expression jó s Majális zórakozás, a pleasant amusement...
Cezanne’s Picnic on a Riverbank (1873-1874) is a partie de campagne that may be a vague allusion to Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) A trio of two men and a woman congregate on the riverbank. The woman sits alone, hat off, her parasol between her legs....
Carroll upends beach picnic expectations in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Still, its tenor is darkly mocking, qualities evident in Tweedledee’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” Of course, everyone laughs at the silly...
Tavernier’s “The Picnic Season,” a cover for The Daily Graphic, depicts a picnic excursion up the Hudson River. The narrative begins as picnickers board a steamer from Jones Wood, a famous commercial picnic ground in northern Manhattan (an area on the east side...
Long forgotten, Austin’s Stumps, A Story for Children story, oozes Victorian social pedagogy and standard comfort food. Austin’s audience loved Stumps, aka Cecily, a bratty four-year-old brat loved for her lisping mispronunciations, especially...
Garcia Mencia’s middle-class picnickers have out to the country for afternoon lunch. They are well provisioned. Compare Garica Mencía’s La merienda with Pál Szinyei Merse’s Majális (1873). See Antonio Garcia Mencía. La Merienda (1874). Oil on...
Ford’s painting At Hanging Rock of sightseers picnicking is an inspiration to Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). The picnickers are middle class and dressed in everyday clothing that is ill-suited to the country locale. They walk, converse, read, and...
Becky Sharp’s “pic-nic” begins with “a giddy and rollicking company” on an island in the Mississippi. After traveling by old ferryboat three miles below the town of Hannibal, the picnickers “swarmed ashore and soon the forest distances and craggy heights echoed...
![James [Jacques]Tissot Holyday (1876c.)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/James-Jaques-Tissot.-Holyday-1109-1080x675.jpg)
The epitome of a Victorian picnic is Tissot’s Holyday. Tissot arranged a picnic of a family and friends in the garden of his home in St. John Woods. They sit beside a sparkling white cloth, china, flatware, a cake, sliced cheese on a platter, a platter of grapes, tea,...
Eliot uses sport to illustrate gender relationships. Daniel Deronda has two archery picnics that do not meet the usual expectations of being joyous. Both archery picnics are metaphors in which Gwendolyn Harleth and the other women archers are contrasted to the goddess...
Stevenson’s picnics are squibs embedded in Essays of Travel: Essays in the Art of Writing. “An Autumn Effect” is memorable for the phrase “the spirit of picnic.” “The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing, ”...
Zola’s pique-nique at the Moulin-d’argent [Silver Windmill] is not a picnic in our contemporary sense. According to French usage, it was a style of dining indoors. When Gervaise Macquart and Coupeau host their wedding party, each guest is expected to pay a...
When Rothrock photographed this picnic party of soldiers and their wives and companions in the desert at Fort McDowell, that temperature was probably 92 degrees, give or take. The group had gone to the desert to celebrate May Day, and Rothrock accompanied them. His...
