On a Sunday in August, Commander Caractacus Pott announces Mimsie, the mother, Jemima and Jeremy, eight-year-old twins: “Today is going to be a roaster,” he said, “a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a...
Winogrand’s photograph White Sands Monument is a stunning view of a picnic table in the White Sands Monument National Monument in New Mexico. The white dunes are composed of powdery gypsum. The figures have left their Chevrolet and set out a picnic lunch under the...
William Kurelek said he carried “wretchedness like a heavy stone sewn up inside of me.” At times, the stone was lifted as in two picnic paintings Manitoba Party (1964) and Out of the Maze (1973), each testifying his recovery from schizophrenia and lost...
NASA’s space food makes a picnic. Aboard Gemini 3, “The Molly Brown,” Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and John Young rocketed and enjoyed a picnic of corned beef sandwiches purchased at a local deli in Cocoa Beach. As Grissom began to eat it, the...
Tucked into Beard’s many cookbooks are informative and playful suggestions for picnicking. He writes, “Wherever it is done, picnicking can be one of the supreme pleasures of outdoor life. At its most elegant, it calls for the accompaniment of the best...
When Auden was twenty-four and just starting as a poet, he placed himself on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses of the arts, where he might find his place at a “picnic on the lower slopes” with minor poets. Thirty-plus years later,...
Two picnics engage viewers to admire Lindsay’s unmistakable style. The Picnic, done in 1944) is a joke that upends expectations. Half of the women picnickers are naked. The Duke’s Picnic (1945) is a typical picnic where all the guests are clothed. Viewers...
Help! It is Richard Lester’s romp with The Beatles. Among the many scenes is a brief picnic in the snow that sets up singing “Ticket to Ride.” The song and the picnic are completely disconnected. And there’s no picnic basket when the quartet sits at a red and white...
Franey, executive chef of Le Pavilion, New York’s only four-star restaurant, and Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, planned an August picnic on Gardiners Island. * It was staged in August 1965 and ironically reported in a Life magazine issue...
Wise’s The Sound of Music picnic is among film’s happiest and most exuberant picnics. It’s his creation because Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical does not have picnic. Maria and the children sing “Do-Re-Mi” while marching in the...
When a child is murdered at Bratbe’s picnic, a public and family scandal erupts. Then it begins to rain. Hytha Bratbe’s picnic is an annual event for about 800 invited guests, including the Prime Minister, at her estate in the West Sussex Downs, surpassing...
Ironically, the picnic at Hanging Rock overpowers the narrative though it is the novel’s shortest section. The events and ambiance are so actual that readers accept the narrative at face value. Lindsay helped set this delusion by suggesting, “Whether...
Botero’s picnics express moments of happiness, abundance, and love of life in the landscape with ample food, wine, and other provisions. Sometimes, his picnickers are so relaxed they fall asleep. His early exploration of the picnic theme, Picnic in the Mountains,...
Five years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Hughes wrote Iron Man as entertainment to help their children Frieda and Nicholas deal with their mother’s death. The story is a fantasy about a colossal Iron Man (from somewhere unknown in the universe) with an appetite for...
According to Muriel Spark’s novel, Miss Brodie sometimes took the girls into the Marcia Blaine school garden for a lesson. But it was a lesson and not a picnic. Neame’s school picnic of Brodie with her girls is his invention. For the film, Neame and...
Celentano’s painting Picnic depicts working-class people happily at leisure. The picnic is simple without frills or elegance. A family picnic in the country. the picnic blanket is spread out under a tree. Seems to be several families, and they all cluster on or around...
Rorem’s bitchy recollection of a “collapsed romance” inspired Picnic on the Marne: Seven Waltzes. When his romance with Claude Benedick was hot in the 1950sRorem was lovey-dovy. But in 1967, all that was left was rancor. Rorem’s The New York Diary (1967) spews his...
![Pál Szinyei Merse’s Postage Picnic in May [aka Majális] (1967)](https://picnicwit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Pál-Szinyei-Merses-Picnic-in-May-aka-Majális-1873-1080x675.jpg)
The Hungarian government has issued postage stamps in honor of Merse’s standing among the nation’s most important painters. The former was published in 1966 and the latter in 1967. Majális celebrates the seasonal change and the Hungarian custom of dining outside in...
Ray-Jones’ attitude towards life was to expose its “gentle madness” and “to walk, like Alice, through a Looking-Glass, and find another kind of world with the camera.” He preferred to photograph situations that are “ambiguous and unreal, and the juxtaposition of...
Though it’s February and light snow is on the ground, Rose Burbank stops for a picnic. She’s romancing George Burbank, a good-hearted undemonstrative rancher. He’s thinking about his automobile and what it would be to have a more luxurious model, a...
