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 joue aussi.
Here we drink, we dance, we laugh!A
And sometimes we play too.
Actually, the Pic-Nic motto was “Excess.”
Rowlandson’s game is risqué. The participants are familiar with one another, suggesting sex play. But the game was common and innocent. A description of it appears in Golfsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel that Rowlandson illustrated for an 1817 edition. “As every person may not be acquainted with this primaeval pastime,” Goldsmith writes, “it may be necessary to observe, that the company at this play themselves in a ring upon the ground, all, except one who stands in the middle, whose business it is to catch a shoe, which the company shove about under their hams from one to another, something like a weaver’s shuttle. As it is impossible, in this case, for the lady who is up to face all the company at once, the great beauty of the play lies in hitting her a thump with the heel of the shoe on that side least capable of making a defense.”
Rowland’s caricature is mild considering James Gillray’s savagery in Blowing the Pic-Nics, The Pic-Nic Orchestra, and Dilettanti Theatrical;-or-a Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic-Nic Orgies.
Featured Image: Thomas Rowlandson. Hunt the Slipper, Pic-Nic Revels (1802).
See Joseph Grego. Rowlandson the Caricaturist, A selection from his works
With anecdotal descriptions of his famous caricatures. London: Chatto & Windus 1880