Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, “picnicked” in Hyde Park in 1654. According to Cromwell’s secretary of state Edmund Ludlow, “His highness, only accompanied with secretary Thurloe and some few of his gentlemen and servants, went to take...
Milton never uses the word picnic or any synonym but knows the concept and uses it freely for satiating Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall in Paradise Lost. Because they had no means of cooking, Milton supposes that Adam and Eve were inadvertent Vegans...
Pepys’s “frolique” is a euphemism for a picnic, which did not exist as a word in English. It was among his favorite ways to spend an afternoon with friends idling. It was a favorite way for him to spend an afternoon with friends idling. We know this...
Bakhuizen embellished this seascape (his usual subject) with a group of picnickers. Picnick ann zee’s contemporary title is appropriate but inaccurate because picnic was not applied to an alfresco meal in 1701. Pique-nique had only been included in Gilles...
Watteau’s Rendez-vous de chasse illustrates a common activity among hunters, especially aristocrats who stopped about midday for a luncheon. The pause was called a tryst (a meeting at predetermined location), where their wives or mistresses met the hunters....
Watteau’s The Collation or Lunch in the Open (1710-1720s c.) is intimate and picnicky. Among his works, it is the most like a déjeuner sur l’herbe, except for his hunt luncheon subjects. As usual, for the French, the subject is not referred to as un...
Even if George Lambert knew the French word pique-nique, he would not describe an outing on the grass because it was not used in this context. By French custom, it was an indoor meal. Moreover, there is no evidence the English used pique-nique in writing or vocabulary...
Writing to his dear friend (and probable mistress) Martha Blount, Pope related his adventure at Netley Abbey and his alfresco luncheon there. He does not call it a picnic because the word was not used in English parlance until 1806. (See Harris’s The happy...
This view of Bath from the southeast by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck shows the distant city from the hills above the River Avon. Beneath the view is a brief history of the city to 1734. Though the Bucks did not have the word picnic, they embellished with shepherds and...
Because the scene is obviously a picnic, the National Gallery of Art’s title, The Picnic after the Hunt, is apt. But Lancret, whose language was French, would not have used pique-nique because it refers to an indoor dinner. More likely, he would have titled un repas...
De Troy’s hunt meals were designed for aristocratic patrons. Two paintings Hunt Breakfast and The Death of a Stag were commissioned as companions pieces by Louis XV and designed for his private dining room in Fontainebleau. Hunt Breakfast depicts the high spirits of...
As usual among the French, a halt on the hunt is never referred to as a picnic, although that’s what it is. Van Loo’s Halte de chasse is a narrative of a stop during the hunt, at which the ladies meet the hunters at a predetermined place, called a tryst,...
Because the scene is obviously a picnic, the National Gallery of Art’s title, The Picnic after the Hunt, is apt. But Lancret would not have used pique-nique because the French denoted it as an indoor dinner. More likely, he would have titled un repas de chasse, as he...
Montagu “ate a cold loaf,” which suggests a synonym for picnicking, a term that has not survived. She wrote the word in her diary for 1752 while visiting a ruined 12th Century priory in Berkshire being remolded as her residence. Emily J. Climenson, editor of Montagu’s...
Zoffany’s The Garden of Hampton House, with Mr and Mrs David Garrick Taking Tea is a conversation portrait of the Garricks on their lawn in Twickenham. The occasion is a tea party. The group includes Garrick, gesturing towards his brother David, with the fishing rod,...
Proust’s Within a Budding Grove [aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] is sometimes remembered for young Marcel’s picnics on the bluffs at Balbec, a fictional town in Normandy. (Proust does not use pique-nique because this is an outdoor meal.) With a...
Rousseau was not thinking of a pique-nique when he wrote, “The turf will be our chairs and table, the banks of the stream our side-board, and our dessert is hanging on the trees.” He knew that pique-nique was an indoor meal for which friends shared the...
Hickey’s Memoirs included a picnic luncheon in Westminster Abbey during the coronation of George III in September 1762. His memory of the coronation is humorous if it’s true. Many of Hickey’s memories are lascivious, and he was regarded as a rake....
Coke added a salon picnic into her personal gossip. Like Chesterfield, whose son attended salon picnics in Hanover 25 years earlier, Coke’s “picnic” was locked in her personal writing and not published until 1970. While traveling on the Continent in...
Goldsmith does not use the word picnic, but two such episodes in The Vicar of Wakefield exist. They are so obvious that in English Picnics, Georgina Battiscombe credits with the first “picnics” in English literature. If only he had used the word! Goldsmith...
