PicnicWit is an exploration of picnics, the kinds you read about, look at, or enjoy in films. Many are ordinary and follow the standard and very familiar picnic script like Jane Austen’s Box Hill picnic in Emma; Charles Dickens romantic picnic birthday party in David Copperfield; and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Among artists, Thomas Cole’s A Pic Nic Party is traditional, as is Henri Matisse’s shimmering picnic in Luxe, Calme, et Volupté. Others deliberately challenge our expectations and novelty, sometimes turning their picnics topsy-turvy like Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, a sexual tryst that is deliberately risqué, or Michel Gondry’s picnic in Mood Indigo, where the picnic is half in sunshine and half in rain. Even Gondry’s food choices are half and half: bread and wine, and an uncooked wild boar’s head.
Michel Gondry. Mood Indigo.Screenplay by Luc Bossi and Michel Gondry based on Boris Vian’s L’Éume des jours (1947), translated by Stanley Chapman. (2013) Colin (Romain Duris) pours wine for Chloé (Audrey Tatou) While Nicholas (Omar Sy) happily looks on.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that looking at a pleasant agricultural landscape arouses “a spirit of picnic.” Never at a loss for words, William S. Gilbert’s libretto for Thespis or the Gods Grown Old includes a joyful declaration by a happy actor, “Bless you, my people, bless you. Let the revels commence. After all, for thorough, unconstrained unconventional enjoyment, give me a picnic.”
Featured Image: Henri Matisse. Luxe, Calme et Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, aka Luxury, Calm and Pleasure. oil on canvas (1904). Musée d’Orsay