Pineapple Portrait watercolour Print
A Fruit Made of Many Fruits
A pineapple looks, at a glance, like a single large fruit with an unusually tough, patterned skin. It is not. Each of the diamond-shaped segments visible across its surface is the remains of an individual flower, and a pineapple is technically what botanists call a multiple or composite fruit, dozens of separate flowers along a single spike fusing together as they develop into what reads, from the outside, as one solid object. The crown of spiked leaves on top is not decoration left behind by a grower either; it is the plant's own vegetative top, and it is famously capable of being twisted off, dried briefly and planted whole to grow an entirely new pineapple plant, the same trick that let the fruit travel and be propagated across the world long before refrigerated shipping existed.
The plant itself is a bromeliad, part of a family more commonly associated with epiphytes, the tank-forming plants that grow perched in the branches of rainforest trees, collecting rainwater in a central rosette of leaves rather than drawing it up through soil. The pineapple is one of the few members of that family to have gone back to growing terrestrially, rooted in the ground like a more conventional plant, though it keeps the same low, spiky rosette form as its epiphytic relatives.
Europe's relationship with the pineapple has its own well-documented history, driven almost entirely by how difficult and expensive the fruit was to grow anywhere outside the tropics. Once methods for cultivating pineapples under glass, in heated "pineapple houses" called pineries, were developed by wealthy estate gardeners from the seventeenth century onward, a home-grown pineapple became one of the most extravagant status symbols available to European aristocracy, sometimes rented out for a single evening's dinner table display rather than eaten, a fruit that could cost more than the meal surrounding it. The carved stone pineapples still found on gateposts and rooftops across Britain and elsewhere are a direct architectural echo of that history, adopted as a symbol of hospitality and lavish welcome precisely because the real fruit was, for a long time, one of the most expensive things a host could put on a table.
Painted in fine watercolour detail and printed on high quality matt-finish 100% white cotton 310gsm paper, this portrait is available in A4 (297mm x 210mm), A3 (420mm x 297mm) and A2 (594mm x 420mm), with an acid-free card backing board supplied and no frame included. It suits a kitchen or dining room wall obviously, though a hallway or garden room just outside the kitchen proper is a safer long-term home for watercolour, away from steam and strong midday light.
Glaze with UV-filtering glass wherever it hangs, and choose a larger size such as A3 or A2 if the piece is going somewhere it will be seen from across a room rather than close up.
Prices run from £20 for A4 to £60 for A2, printed to order.
Pineapple Portrait watercolour Print — A4/A3/A2, matt print on 100% cotton 310gsm paper. View the piece