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.
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