Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...
Moffat’s picnics, all titled Picnic and all completed in 1963, are influenced by Fernand Leger’s Partie de champagne series o paintings. Featured Image: The Picnic at the New Bridge
Evans’s photograph of Robert Lowell and Caroline Blackwood suggests they are just another loving couple picnicking on the grass. Evans was aware of the couple’s tension but wrote to a friend, “I think they do a lot for each other, and it is a great...
Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) includes the memorable simile: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” A neat turn of phrase....
Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has...
Lester’s The Three Musketeers is a comic adaptation of Alexandre Duma’s novel. The halte de chasse on the royal hunt portrays the lavish preparation for an outdoor meal fit for a king. Louis XIV spent many hours hunting, and there is a passing...
Casual readers usually neglect Christie’s poems, but her inner life is there and not in Marple’s or Poirot’s. “Picnic 1960” suggests Christie never lost her sense of her good life. In the final poem of the volume, Christie makes the case...
Fellini’s scampagnata, picnic, in Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical narrative, tells about an ordinary alfresco lunch set in the shade of the yard of a farmhouse. What is served is unknown, but there are bottles of raffia-bound Chianti, a bowl of hard-boiling eggs,...
Just shy of the centenary of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Taylor and the Shermans film is a musical. Becky Thatcher’s birthday picnic is recreated as rollicking July Fourth holiday picnic. It’s not Twain’s classic, but it’s light-hearted fun....
Exley’s semi-memoir Pages from a Cold Island, an homage to Edmund Wilson, describes his disastrous picnic on the Sugar River with Mary Polcar, Wilson’s “drinking, dinner, and movie companion,” and get her to talk about him. Exley’s...
Fowles’s The Ebony Tower is a sendup of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Although a boat is in the background, it is uncertain how Manet’s picnickers arrived for their dejeuner sur l’herbe. Fowles’ version of the picnic is definitive; the...
Bainbridge’s idea of picnic fun is a biting satire of an English company picnic during which everything that can go awry does, including murder. Two friends, Brendass and Freda, organize a picnic for the employees at an Italian wine and spirits shop on Hope Street in...
If you call it a picnic, it’s a picnic. Who is to argue with Rosalie Gascoigne when she explained her sculpture is based on an actual picnic organized by James Mollison. It was held on a mountain on a windy day. So, the wire netting captures air; the birds...
Albee’s Seascape is set on a beach, the evolutionary boundary from which sea creatures emerged to walk on land. The action begins innocently. Charlie and Nancy Man are just finishing a picnic when they encounter two primordial green lizards, Leslie and Sarah,...
Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975has two picnics fifty years apart. The narrative concerns the lives of two unfulfilled English women in Satipur, a town amidst the heat and dust of the plains in Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. In 1923, Olivia Rivers visits...
Yep’s Dragonwings is the story of Moon Shadow, who emigrates from China to San Francisco in 1903 to live with his father, Windrider. Together, they endure racial antagonism but prosper, supported by Windrider’s work in the family laundry and then as a handyman....
Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel about how the Valentine’s Day picnic of the Appleyard College girls ended badly. Inexplicably, two girls and a teacher disappear—and are never found. Weir and his screenwriter...
Appleseed Rectory is the site of Amis’s relentlessly unpleasant picnic that defiantly upends expectations. * The picnic is Quentin’s idea of fun for his guests, a free-wheeling and animated by alcohol and drugs. He says to his wife Celia, “I thought...
In E Fontane’s tet, Effi and her lover Major von Crampas eat at a simple wooden table behind the dunes to avoid the Baltic’s gusty winds. A servant has set a cloth with slices of cold meat, rolls, and red wine (served in delicate glasses). Fassbinder’s picnics, of...
Goldin’s is a spoof at Mickey Mouse’s expense. “CZ and Max on the Beach, Truro, MA” is a staged picnic of CZ and Max on a picnic cloth next to Mickey Mouse’s picture on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Goldin seems to be suggesting that such outings are...
