Introduction

In a recent review of the exhibition Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, Nicola Shulman considers a painting from the seventeenth-century British School entitled Charles II Presented with a Pineapple (c. 1677). The same painting had featured in the exhibition The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion the year before, where it ‘was a prime exhibit … for the sake of the principals’ costumes’ but now, as Shulman wryly notes in her review, ‘it’s on show for the pineapple’. Shulman observes that the juxtaposition of monarch and fruit in the image is by no means straightforward:

What is going on here? Not what we think. Scholarship has revealed that Charles II was perfectly familiar with pineapples by 1677, so it’s not his first pineapple. It has also established that the painting does not represent his gardener, John Rose, presenting him with the first pineapple grown in England, because both men were dead by then. The accompanying [exhibition] essay concludes that ‘the presentation of the first pineapple that the painting reputedly celebrates is entirely fictitious’, but has no answer for the question now arising: why was ‘The King’s Gardener Hands Him an Imported Pineapple’ an event for commemoration on this scale?

Shulman 2015, 7