Edith Wharton’s  Hudson River Bracketed Beach Picnic  (1929)

Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed Beach Picnic (1929)

Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed has two picnics, and I’ll treat each as a separate posting. Each picnic features the protagonist Vance Weston with different women, Halo (Héloïse) Spear on Thundertop Mountain at sunrise over the Hudson River, and Laura Lou...
Ford Madox Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” (1932)

Ford Madox Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” (1932)

Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” makes his life in 1932 seem picnicky. He remembered that brilliant day and the “Homeric feast” enthusiastically. But by the time it was published in 1937, Ford was at various times ailing and depressed,...
Judith Deim’s The Beach Picnic (1936)

Judith Deim’s The Beach Picnic (1936)

Deim’s The Beach Picnic is a portrait of the Cannery Row crowd in Monterey, California.  Among the picnickers are John Steinbeck, the kneeling figure lighting the fire, Ed Rickets (bearded) and reclining with a beer in hand, Deim playing the guitar, looks down at...
Reginald Marsh’s Beach Picnic (1939)

Reginald Marsh’s Beach Picnic (1939)

This is a favorite among Marsh’s Coney Island images. In this instance, a collection of Venuses.  Compare it with John Sloan’s South Beach Bathers and Mabel Dwight’s Coney Island Beach. Featured Image: Beach Picnic (1939). Engraving.
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940)

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940)

Only 2:07 seconds of screen time, but it’s an unpleasant crackling picnic that ends with a slap in the face. Despite the southern Florida heat, Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander are lounging by a crackling fireplace in Xanadu, their palatial estate: he in...
Alberto Moravia’s “Back to the Sea” (1945)

Alberto Moravia’s “Back to the Sea” (1945)

Moravia’s story’s “Back to the Sea” [Ritorno al mare] is about a picnic is without a shred of joy. It’s partly about gender relations and a metaphor for post-war Italy in the guise of a nightmare merénda, In the summer of 1945, Lorenzo,...
Paul Cadmus’s  What I Believe  (1947-1948)

Paul Cadmus’s What I Believe (1947-1948)

Cadmus’s What I Believe (1947-1948) is a beach picnic without food, inspired by E.M. Forester’s essay of the same-named. Forster is the dark man reading a book with the red cover in the lower left foreground. The figures are based on some of Cadmus’ friends and former...
Claude-Autant-Lara’s The Ripening Seed  (1954)

Claude-Autant-Lara’s The Ripening Seed (1954)

Autant-Lara’s Le Blé en herbe is good at separating the dual aspects of love in Colette’s novel about adolescents and friends for years and learning about love while vacationing in Normandy. There are two parts to the narrative. In the first part, teenagers Philippe...
Pierre Franey’s Chefs’ Picnic on Gardiners Island (1965)

Pierre Franey’s Chefs’ Picnic on Gardiners Island (1965)

Franey, executive chef of Le Pavilion, New York’s only four-star restaurant, and Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, planned an August picnic on Gardiners Island. * It was staged in August 1965 and ironically reported in a Life magazine issue...