Croquet - Art and Literature

Art and Literature

The way croquet is depicted in paintings and books says much about popular perceptions of the game, though little about the reality of modern play.

• Winslow Homer, Édouard Manet, Louise Abbéma and Pierre Bonnard all have paintings titled The Croquet Game.
• Norman Rockwell often depicted the game, including in his painting Croquet.
• A favorite subject of Edward Gorey, a croquet reference often appeared in the first illustration of his books. The Epiplectic Bicycle opens with two illustrations of the main characters playing with croquet mallets.
• H. G. Wells wrote The Croquet Player, which uses croquet as a metaphor for the way in which man confronts the very problem of his own existence.
• Lewis Carroll featured a surrealistic version of the game in the popular children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a hedgehog was used as the ball, a flamingo the mallet, and playing cards as the hoops.
• In the Thursday Next series of novels, notably Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde depicts an alternative world in which croquet is a brutal mass spectator sport.
• In the 1988 film Heathers, Winona Ryder and her friends are depicted as playing croquet.