In the sumptuous catalogue for the upcoming Met show on Bellows, in which this painting is included, curator Charles Brock observes that the Woodstock paintings, including The Picnic, conformed “neither to the dictates of tradition nor to those of Modernism, and were too imaginative and eccentric to be easily summarized; they continue to defy any standard critical appraisal.” Bellows’ movements “toward avant-garde images were obscured or ignored,” he wrote.
In his catalog essay, “A Life Cut Short,” Mark Cole remarks on the abstracted, eerily still nature of The Picnic. “The painting’s horizon functions as a line of symmetry and the motionless lake emphatically mirrors the volumetric land masses on the far side of its shore, while overhead a row of robust clouds, appearing more solid than vaporous, mimics the band of figural and landscape forms at the bottom of the canvas,” Cole writes. Because of its color choices, the painting “appears to radiate from within.” Finally, Cole sums up the ambitions in this strange work that seems to prefigure so much: “The stylized formal aspects in the painting, so at odds with a straightforward transcription, make The Picnic the most fantastically artificial of the artist’s landscapes.”
A dozen years later, McClellan did his Picnic, a vertical lithograph that showed a bunch of people picknicking, napping and gawking on a steep cliffside above Woodstock’s Village Green. McClellan’s composition, unlike Bellows’, exaggerates height rather than merely suggesting it. The characters are looking down at a very steep drop, a simplified version of the way can one look down at the hamlet from the slope of Mead’s or Overlook Mountains.
Next to the picknickers McClellan included a recumbent figure stretched out under a tree, tilted in exactly the same direction as the Speicher figure in the Bellows picture. The shadow of the tree next to his head falls in such a way that it covers the face of the sleeping figure, indicating he may be in a different head space than the nearby picknickers in the sun. Looking up in the tree above the sleeper one’s eye picks up the figure of a boy climbing in its branches. Except for a man cautiously squatting on his haunches near the cliffside (and a couple of tiny stick figures in the distance, one pointing, at the very highest point of the precipice), the climbing boy provides, like Bellows’ balancing daughter, the only evidence of activity — and he is on the safe side of the tree away from the cliff edge.
The sleeping sprawled figure with legs splayed apart near the edge of the painting has been seen before. Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s famous oil on wood painting of 1565 entitled The Harvesters by the Met, depicts such a sleeping figure at the foot of a tree occupying a key compositional location, separating a landscape of active hay harvesting for a town in the middle distance on the left from the arrangement and consumption of such products on the right.
It is clear the figure under the left side of the tree trunk, the hinge of the entire Breugel work, is one of the harvesters. The sleeping man, legs splayed out and sharing the tree with them, is fatigued. A circle of eight people, most if not all women, are huddled next to him under the shadow on the right side of the trunk, picknicking. They are involved in the harvesting process, too, but in a different role than the toiling men.
Symbolized by the image of the sleeping figure, Breugel’s commonplace narrative of harvest life has radiated from within through the centuries in the world of artists. That’s why I believe that Bellows stole it from Breugel for his The Picnic, and McClelland stole it from both Breugel and Bellows.
This painting of everyday life continues to be widely celebrated. Free of the cherubs, saints and madonnas of contemporary Italian painting, the mannerist landscapes of French and British painting, and the goblins and devils of previous Netherlandish painting, it was a great breakthrough.
“Immature poets imitate,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, “mature poets steal.” He explained his pronouncement thus: “The good poet wields his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which is torn.”
