Following Cronin’s, The Citadel, Vidor understands how central the picnic episode is for exploring how success and money distort the lives of Andrew and Elizabeth Manson. Once idealistic, Dr. Andrew Manson has gone over to the dark side, considering money more...
“This is war, not a garden party!” Dr. Meade’s stern admonition to Scarlett O’Hara and Aunt Pittypat Hamilton during the siege of Atlanta. Meade reminds Scarlett that she must not abandon Melanie Wilkes and Pittypat that ordinary social customs don’t apply in war. ...
FDR’s Hyde Park picnic is still news sixty years after. Memorable, too, are Great Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, first-time visitors to the United States and their first hot dogs. The picnic was an informal diplomatic affair for 150 guests...
A hodge-podge of wordplay. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), links picnics with lust. You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering or wake in winter, window machree, but snore sung in my old Balbriggan surtout....
Arriving at Twelve Oaks garden party, Gerald O’Hara is pleased to say, “Well, John Wilkes, it’s a grand day you’ll be havin’ for the barbecue.” It’s momentous because it is the beginning of Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s...
Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz omits Baum’s picnic episode. Dorothy’s wicker is meant only to carry Toto. See Victor Fleming. The Wizard of Oz (1939). Screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf is based on L. Frank...
Wood’s romantic picnic on a mountain in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is his idea. James Hilton’s Charles Chipping and Katherine Ellis meet while hiking in the Lake District, fall “head over heels in love,” and marry soon after. Wood sets the mountain...
This is a favorite among Marsh’s Coney Island images. In this instance, a collection of Venuses. Compare it with John Sloan’s South Beach Bathers and Mabel Dwight’s Coney Island Beach. Featured Image: Beach Picnic (1939). Engraving.
When the WPA commissioned Rummler, Works Project Administration, to paint a mural for Norwalk’s City Hall, his preferred topic was picnicking at Calf Pasture Beach. It was a favorite town locale and an emblem of Norwalk’s community’s spirit. The...
The Day of the Locust may have been the best novel ever written about Hollywood, but Nathanael West and his publisher Random House miscalculated. They believed a biting satire of the film industry and its insidious confusion of illusion and reality would sell, but it...
McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) first-time sexual encounter, Mick Kelly (13), and Harry Minowitz (15), a “Jew boy” with horn-rimmed glasses. Mick is taller than Harry. She’s 5’3″ and 103 pounds. He’s a couple of inches...
Wolcott’s tables for St. Thomas’s Church picnic is similar to Nell Choate Jones’s 1945 Church Supper but differ from William Clary’s picnic on the grounds in Valentines, Virginia. See Marion Post Wolcott. Table in picnic grove set for St. Thomas Church supper near...
Le Brocquy’s second wife, Anne Madden, remembers that the model in A Picnic was a friend. She preferred not to remember the woman in black and white (next to the umbrella) is Le Brocquy’s first wife, Jane Stoney. (She’s the same pensive woman in the portrait The Woman...
Rackham’s final project was a set of illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He was suffering from rheumatism and dying of cancer. Yet, he completed a series of twelve scenes, two of which are of Ratty and Mole’s picnic on the...
It’s unpicnicky. A Mad Tea-Party is agitated and foreboding, perhaps suggesting Fitzgerald’s unfulfilled (unrealistic) desire to become a ballet dancer. Despite the allusion to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this tea party is without humor. If Fitzgerald is Alice,...
There is a story here, but I don’t know it. See Alfred Reginald Thompson. Evening Picnic (Undated). Oil on canvas.
Delaney‘s paintings during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s were figurative. Over time, he shifted to abstraction during his life in Paris in the 1950s. Both The Picnic and Distant Horizons are no-food picnics. Featured Image: The Picnic. Oil on canvas....
Only 2:07 seconds of screen time, but it’s an unpleasant crackling picnic that ends with a slap in the face. Despite the southern Florida heat, Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander are lounging by a crackling fireplace in Xanadu, their palatial estate: he in...
Hitchcock added a picnic to the screenplay of Rebecca to reveal Jack Flavell’s intention to blackmail Max De Winter for the murder of his deceased wife, Rebecca. Flavell’s disquieting revelation occurs on the day of the inquest regarding Rebecca’s...
