Pineapple Portrait Greetings Card
A Fruit Sat For Its Portrait
The word portrait usually belongs to people: a face, a pose, a sitter who knows they are being looked at. Applying it to a pineapple is not entirely a joke. Sally Price's watercolour sets the fruit centrally on the page, upright and dignified, in the kind of composed, formal arrangement a painter would once have reserved for a person of some standing — and the pineapple, oddly enough, has the history to deserve the comparison.
Few fruits have ever been taken quite as seriously as the pineapple was in Britain and northern Europe from the seventeenth century onward. Native to South America and entirely unsuited to a cold, damp climate, a pineapple grown on British soil required a heated glasshouse — a "pinery" — built and staffed purely for that purpose, at a cost only the wealthiest households could justify. A single ripe fruit, once produced, was valuable enough to be rented out for the evening rather than eaten: displayed as the centrepiece of a formal table to signal exactly how much money and horticultural effort its owner commanded, then returned the next day for its next social engagement, sometimes long after it had stopped being edible at all. Owning the ability to grow one, even once, was worth commemorating properly — the fruit even features in at least one well-known piece of British art showing a gardener ceremonially presenting the first pineapple raised on home soil to the reigning monarch, treated with the gravity of a state occasion rather than a harvest.
Its name carries its own small history too. English calls it a pineapple because early observers thought its scaled, tessellated exterior resembled a pine cone — "apple" here used in its old, general sense of any rounded fruit, as in the now-archaic pattern behind words like "pomegranate". Almost every other European language instead uses some form of ananas, borrowed via Portuguese from a Tupi word used by the indigenous peoples of South America where the fruit actually originates. English is, in this one case, the odd one out — describing the fruit by what it resembles rather than by what it is actually called where it grows.
None of that history required a monarch's table to still matter. What the pineapple's brief but intense reign as a luxury status object left behind is a fruit permanently associated with hospitality and welcome, carved into stonework and plasterwork long after glasshouse pineries went out of fashion and the real fruit became an easy, inexpensive supermarket purchase. Painting one formally, as a portrait rather than as a study, taps directly into that inherited sense of occasion — a fruit that once justified its own building being treated, here, with exactly the composed respect that history suggests it is owed.
Watercolour and drawing handle the fruit's tessellated skin with the same patience a formal sitter's portrait would need for the fine detail of lace or brocade: each hexagonal facet placed individually, the colour shifting gradually from green to gold, the whole surface built up rather than suggested. The stiff crown of leaves at the top stands in for the sitter's own upright bearing — a fruit that, whatever else has changed about its status, still knows how to hold itself.
The card underneath keeps to the same understated format as the rest of the range: Textured White Matt 324gsm stock, blank inside for your own message, a white envelope, and a biodegradable sleeve for posting. Card size is 15cm x 15cm. Original watercolour and drawing by artist and designer Sally Price of Boldstone Sculpture. Price £3.00.
It suits a welcome, a celebration, or anyone who appreciates a fruit that once had its own building.
Pineapple Portrait Greetings Card — 15cm x 15cm, Textured White Matt 324gsm card. View the piece