Unlike real-life children who are often persnickety about what is offered, fictional children at picnics take what is offered. That’s because most juvenile stories associate fun with baskets full of sweets, carbs, and fats. Presumably, well-behaved children require...
Picnic cookbooks are relatively new. The first in 1915 was Linda Larned’s One Hundred Picnic Suggestions. Like the song from Gypsy, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.,” new cookbooks, each striving for novelty, appear every year. Some are prettier than...
Georgina Battiscombe’s 1949 English Picnics is a study of English picnics in literature and art that has become a go-to standard because it was the first of its kind. Her writing is distinctive, authoritative voice and her examples and explanations usually first-rate....
Craigie W. Craigie’s “The Vocabulary of Picnic” is a collection of 19th-century compound expressions for a picnic, such as basket dinner, basket lunch, basket party, and basket picnic. There is a Croquet basket picnic, Grand basket pic-nic, social...
Picnic is a universal word. Easy to speak, easy to spell, and easy to understand. We all know what a picnic is. The word suggests an image of what a picnic is and its expectations for pleasure. Brazilian Portuguese: piquenique Croatian: piknik Czech: piknik Danish:...
The Pic Nic Society attracted obsessive gamblers, eager amateur actors called Dilettanti, and gourmand diners. Taking advantage of a truce in a decade-long war with France (led by Napoleon, then First Consul), the Pic Nics wagered (and lost) that London might have a...
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...
The Courtship, Marriage, and Pic Nic Dinner of Cock Robin. To Which is Added, Alas! The Doleful Death of the Bridegroom is the first outdoor meal named a picnic in our modern sense. When John Harris retold the old story of Sparrow’s fateful murder of Cock...
Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic appeared in 1809, six years after Harris’s The Happy Courtship, Nic. It is now remembered, if at all, as the second published reference to a picnic in English. However, following the French custom of indoor dining, the...
Dinner on the grounds (always with an “s”) is a Methodist revival meeting picnic. There are many geographic variations throughout the United States, but Southerners seem to hold sway, scheduling the meeting for “lay-by time,” sometime between...
Corny picnic satire was in vogue among English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1871 Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. Typical “The Pic-Nic” is sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen” from Sheridan’s The...
Rousseau and Abbé Etienne Condillac dined en piquenique sometime in 1745 or 1747. The date is uncertain because Rousseau is careless with dates related to the incident twenty years after in Confessions. Hard up and living in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis, Rousseau...
Being Anglophile and aware of London happenings, Irving probably picked up the aftermath of the Pic Nic Society scandal during his tour of Europe 1804-1806. The word stuck, but it’s used only once as an adjective to mean something silly. Under the heading “Fashions by...
Homer’s A Picnic in the Woods is a pleasant joke, suggesting that the usually staid picnic might also be tumultuous. The action here is everywhere. A large picnic blanket is spread and filled with food: a bowl of fruit, a large ham with a knife for carving, a...
Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma! is an adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! (1943) is an adaptation of Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). Hammerstein wrote one (Act 2) to intensify the rivalry between Curly McClain and...
Donald Duck’s beach picnic makes a joke of expectations. Intending a pleasant day at the beach, Donald is upset and bedeviled with turmoil. Especially the ants, dressed in war paint like “Native Americans,” steal Donald’s picnic. The idea is...
Anderson’s rooftop is an example of the urban version of tar beach. For another example, see Ringgold’s Tar Beach. See Carlos Anderson Sunshine Canyon (1943c.)
Renoir’s close adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Partie de Campagne is about the sad romantic consequences of a family picnic. Even the menu is Maupassant’s: fried fish, stewed rabbit [fricassee], salad, beer, claret, and coffee. However, Renoir...
Boudin’s Luncheon Grass, the Family of Eugène (1866) is apleasant family outing in a park. Unlike Manet’s Luncheon, this is not confrontational or sexual. Because Boudin was a friend of the Manet family, especially Eugène, this picture of them picnicking...
Thomas Wright found songs, now obscure, about women having meals in taverns and bathhouses that are suspiciously like picnics. He writes about this in The History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England, suggesting that sharing food and entertainment is common...
