A Moveable Feast

The picnic, despite its associations with sandwiches in Tupperware and windswept British beaches, has an illustrious and exotic history, as Benedict Flynn describes.

The lawn of St James’s Square at lunch time offers about as much personal space during the summer as a gannet colony in the breeding season. But ask anyone searching for a patch of grass to sit on with their soup and sushi and they will tell you, lunch al fresco elbow-room only is still better than al desko. If the ground is damp underbottom, the soup and sushi the same temperature, so what? It is more than a grabbed bite under the plane trees. It is a little picnic, the most natural thing in the world to do given a hint of blue sky and dappled shade.

Nothing sums up the simple enjoyment of life better than a picnic. Which is a paradox because the picnic, for all its uncomplicated joy, is a sophisticated pleasure. It hints at Neolithic camp-fire jollity, but at its heart is the revolutionary idea that Nature is something to be sought out as charming and spiritually refreshing rather than feared or exploited. This is a commonplace notion to us weaned on the Romantics, but without it the whole business where ‘one has a home and eats out of doors by choice’ , as Osbert Sitwell points out in his essay Picnics and Pavilions (1944), is inconceivable.

Lovers’ Picnic, from a manuscript of the Divan (collected works) of Hafiz, c.1526–7. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Stuart Cary Welch in honor of Edith Iselin Gilbert Welch.

William Wordsworth et al. were intrepid picnic pioneers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired to write the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) on an excursion to the Quantocks, and if the picnic Holy Grail combines perfect spot, memorable conversation and delicious food, then Wordsworth found it on Helvellyn summit with Humphry Davy and Walter Scott. The moment was so moving Wordsworth was unable to express his emotions, not even recollected in tranquillity afterwards. The Romantics roused such enthusiasm in us that we fondly imagine picnics as quintessentially British, a reflection of our stoicism faced with a changeable climate. But from sandy sandwiches in Tupperware on a windswept beach to déjeuner-sur-lay-by with bullet-hard boiled eggs and steamed-up windows, we picnic in ignorant bliss. ‘The Englishman’s grand gesture, ’ according to Georgina Battiscombe in English Picnics (1949), is in fact a foreign affair. Appropriately for a moveable feast, picnics have an illustrious and exotic history.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) provides the first crumb on our Ur-picnic trail. Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of one of Khayyám’s quatrains, ‘Here with a loaf of Bread beneath the Bough … Wilderness is paradise enow’ may be cliché, but it takes us to eleventh-century Abbasid Persia where picnicking was an everyday spiritual and secular celebration of Nature, wild or tamed, as ‘al ni’mah’ , or God’s bounty.

As the Qur’an describes it, paradise takes the form of a ‘pairi diz’ , a Persian walled garden. The Qur’an details the menu too. If for Khayyám a wilderness picnic was enjoyable, a picnic in a pairi diz eating cherries, dates stuffed with almonds, and fried chicken, was literally a foretaste of heaven – where there would be no need, as Al Zahir, Caliph of Cairo did, to fly in cherries tied to the feet of carrier pigeons. Picnics have long been extolled in Persian poetry as ideal for ‘al atyaban’ , or the ‘two good things’: eating and lovemaking. To be recited at a night picnic, the lines from Kitab al-Tabikh, the tenthcentury Arab cookbook by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, ‘She shows … the full moon before the evening’ are not about a woman, but rice pudding. And should inter-course picnic poetry fail to entertain, guests could be presented with a basket of kittens. To play with rather than as an amuse bouche.

In Persia appreciation of nature spread from the walled pairi diz to the wild. In China gardens were developed to recreate the wild in miniature. Mountains are reduced to scholar’s rocks in the tea garden, and the journey to a sacred grove, home to the Immortals, becomes a meandering path to a tea hut. There, in exile from the hurly-burly, the Tea Ceremony takes place, picnicking at its most refined.

It might seem stretching the point to call the Tea Ceremony a picnic. It happens indoors and there’s little to eat. But its essence is the contemplation of nature. A sixteenth-century poem from Senno-Rikyu, earliest of the Tea Ceremony schools, captures the moment: ‘I hold a bowl of tea, I see all of nature represented in its green colour, Closing my eyes, I find green mountains and pure water within my heart, Silently drinking, these become part of me. ’

Less refined picnics also have an equally impressive history in China and Japan, from lakeside moon-watching picnics to eating with the ancestors during Qing Ming, the Chinese spring nature festival. Blossom picnics, as much about appetite as aesthetics, were enjoyed by characters in the eleventh-century Heian epic Tale of Genji. The Japanese proverb ‘dumplings over flowers’ hints at the continuing attraction of these picnics. Drinking to oblivion is also part of the entertainment.

The sixteenth-century memoir of Emperor Babur’s invasion of Hindustan, Babur-nama, is eloquent about the Mughal’s delight in picnics. En route to slaughter the Maratha armies, Babur found time to picnic among the red and yellow spring blossoms of Parashawar. Early in the eighteenth century, many years before picnicking became popular in Western Europe, East India Company wallahs happily took to the Mughal’s idea of fun, ‘a curious cold collation set forth on a large Persian carpet under the spreading of lofty trees, where varieties of wine and musick exhilarate the spirits to a cherful livelyness and render every objective divertive’ .

But it was not an unknown pleasure. The Hapsburg–Valois Wars (1494–1559) saw the fashionably minded French adopting various Italianisms, among them the fork and syphilis, and courtesy of Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89), niece of Lorenzo the Magnificent and wife of Henry II of France, a new aristocratic distraction, the picnic. Medici taste in gardens and their pleasures had a distinctly Moorish flavour. As well as a tree-house based on Caligula’s nest, or ‘nidium’ , at their Villa di Castello near Florence, and secret ‘fayre eating places’ , the garden borrowed numerous Andalusian elements from Poggio Reale outside Naples, residence of the Aragonese Alfonso II, which to Charles VIII of France in 1495 lacked ‘only Adam and Eve to be an earthly paradise’ .

Catherine took the informality of Medici al fresco dining a stage further, and where Catherine went, so followed the court. Venetian ambassadors remarked on her immoderate fondness for ‘simple rustic pleasures’ . She would head into the countryside with a chest, carried by a beast of burden, containing ‘fruit et confitures’ , to consume as mood and situation suggested. At Versailles, Louis XV (1715–54), in his pomp, would also pause for impromptu meals in the Parc-aux- Cerfs, where he had his one-client brothel, insisting his carriage contained meat, pastries and fruit. In the grounds of his chateau at Marly-le-Roi to the west of Paris, he escaped court ceremonial with informal souper intimes, a kind of picnic in a counterfeit Arcadia recreated by paintings and architecture.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863, by Édouard Manet. Courtesy of the Musée D’Orsay, Paris

With centuries of pairi diz imagery lodged in our cultural unconscious, it is natural for us to think of the picnic as a temporary return to Eden, ‘that lost felicity’ . The pastoral, an ancient political– poetical mode, also captures the picnic mood, as a momentary rustic existence that is purer and more innocent than urban life. But neither paradise nor pastoral led to a popular picnic culture. For a meal eaten in the face of the elements to become something enjoyed rather than endured, we had to become noble savages.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau philosophised a space for the picnic when he reversed the conventional fall from grace. Man and nature are better in the original, man in nature best of all. ‘The sight of the countryside, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, a sound appetite, ’ he wrote in the Confessions, published posthumously in 1782, ‘all these serve to free my spirit’ , sentiments that Wordsworth, the synecdochal Romantic and picnic pioneer, would make powerfully his own.

By 1857 picnics were fast becoming a national pastime in Britain. The word alone, according to Chambers’s Journal of that year, summoned ‘the distant murmur of the seas … the hurry of shadowy rivers, and the whisper of autumn woods’ , banishing ‘all things that deform or imbitter our existences’ . Railways, Bank Holidays and Queen Victoria did the rest, ushering in a British golden age of picnics that has obscured their more illustrious foreign history.

Curiously, picnics across the Channel, although just as popular, were tainted with a certain immorality that took years to shake off. ‘Il faut éviter les pique-niques, ’ notes Baronne Staffe in Usages du Monde (1889); ‘Casualness prevails … which can lead to impropriety’ . One of art’s most famous picnics is a case in point. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) in fact depicts the opening scene of an orgy. His own inventory title for it was La Partie carée, a euphemism for a four-way debauch. Little danger of that under the plane trees in St James’s Square, with soup and sushi.

The Pic-Nic Orchestra by James Gillray, 1802. Courtesy The Goldmark Gallery.