Oeil-de-boeuf is Touchard-Lafosse’s pseudonym used to sign off on his gossip reports about Louis XIV’s court and Parisian society Oeil-de-boeuf is a circular window, often indoors, above a doorway. As a metaphor, it suggests gossip that is sexually tinged or...
Lima was a thriving major colonial town now grown into Chile’s capital and largest city with 10 million. Two centuries ago, an unidentified artist of the Lima School painted A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac, a happy picnic in which elegant aristocrats engaged...
It’s a picnic, but little else is known about this painting. Featured Image: Ramon Bayeu y Subias. La merienda (1780s). Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado,
Les Rêvieries du Promeneur Solitaire or Reveries of a Solitary Walker was written in 1776-78, left unfinished, and published posthumously in 1782. It’s composed of ten “walks” or personal essays; the fourth includes the episode about dining in Madame...
Morland’s painting The Anglers’ Repast, aka A Luncheon Party, is a scene of outdoor amusement and leisure. (There was as yet not word to identify this as a picnic.) Though the popular title is The Anglers’ Repast, the presence of fishing gear —...
Rowlandson’s 1790 catalog of everyday life among the Brits includes a picnic scene. People looking at it would recognize an alfresco luncheon, but they would not have a name for it. What we call a picnic was unknown in English. Even if Brits knew the French word...
Lima was a thriving major colonial town now grown into Chile’s capital and largest city with a population of 10 million. Two centuries ago, an unidentified artist of the Lima School painted A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac, a happy picnic in which elegant...
The etymological record of merienda is a blank between 1554 and 1626. After surfacing in Lazarillo de Tormes as a snack, it does not reappear until Quevedo’s El Buscon denotes a typical alfresco picnic. The change in meaning is unaccountable. In this instance,...
Bayeu’s Picnic in the Country [aka Merienda en el Campo] is a study of a proposed tapestry destined for the royal palaces of the Spanish monarchy now exhibited in the Prado’s Salon de Consejos. The picnickers have gathered around awhile cloth set on the...
It resembles a picnic; it’s recreational, but it’s lunch on a trout-fishing excursion on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Ernest Hemingway’s story “Big Two-Hearted River, Part Two,” Nick Adams breaks to have a sandwich. Nick is...
Among his many adventures traipsing about England, John Byng was proud of picnicking on the far side of High Force though the experience left him miserably wet. After spending an uncomfortable night in an inn, Byng hired a guide and, stuffing his pockets with eatable,...
When political rivals attacked, Robespierre replied: “If someone reproaches me, I wait for him here. It is here that he must accuse me, and not in picnics, in particular societies. Is there anyone? Let him get up.” No one stood, but he was eventually forced to resign...
Rowlandson’s Undertakers Regaling is a jibe at Robert Blair’s pious and maudlin “The Grave.”* Rowlandson does not mention Blair, but his audience would have recognized the allusion to his well-known and well-anthologized poem. Appended to...
Spilsbury does not use picnic (if she even knew the word) to describe the luncheon because it was not yet in everyday use. However, The Drinking Well in Hyde Park (1802) reminds us that the park has long been a popular gathering place for socializing and leisure....
Picnic, the English phonetic spelling of pique-nique, owes its introduction in English parlance to the Pic Nics, a London club that had a brief run from 1801-1803. We remember the Pic Nics because James Gillray lampooned and mocked them. We recognize that this was...
Among the Pic Nic Society anecdotes is its sponsorship of a balloon launch. In London. In July 1802, the Pic Nics called an ad hoc meeting to watch and cheer Jacques Garnerin’s successful launch of a hot air balloon from Ranelagh Gardens. See: Universal Magazine of...
Rowlandson’s Hunt the Slipper, Pic-Nic Revels satirizes the Pic-Nics, a society of Dilettanti (amateur actors), gamblers, and gourmands who briefly flourished 1802-3. The rules of the Society are framed on the wall: Ici on boit, on danse, on rit! Et quelquefois on...
Rowlandson’s Richmond Bridge, Surrey documents a picnic party at low tide on the Thames’s sandy shore opposite Hampton Court. It was common for Londoners to hire a water taxi to transport picnicker out of the city and into the country for an afternoon of eating and...
Williams’s Peep into Tottenham Street, or Dilettanti Performers in Training is a knockoff of Gillray’s caricature Dilettanti Theatrical;-or-a Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic-Nic Orgies (Tottenham Street was the location of the rooms the Pic Nics rented for their...
From 1780-1820, “Dilettanti,” or amateur theater aficionados, organized theater groups. Among the most passionate, Louise Craven, Margravine of Ansbach, who wrote plays, produced and acted in them, persuaded her doting husband, the Margrave of Ansbach, to...
