Larry Day, Picnic (Outing: Homage to Le Nain)

The Le Nain brothers were seventeenth-century French painters known for their multifigure genre scenes depicting peasant families gathered around hearth and table. Here Day draws on their interest in down-to-earth subjects, as well as the unique complexity with which their figures seem at once isolated by interior thought and intertwined within the overarching fiction of their compositions. The Le Nains would also frequently include a character who looks outward and implicates the viewer in the dynamics of their paintings.