The pineapple was a particularly popular ornamental motif in the eighteenth century.  This page has a good brief overview of its history (and, as a bonus, explains why it’s called l’ananas in French, which has caused me mild confusion while reading grocery receipts on more than one occasion).  Typically American commercial revisionism has it as a mere symbol of hospitality, but this is of course a hospitality steeped in the economics of colonialism: its popularity was very much a product of its symbolic prominence in the British trade within the West Indies.

Here, for instance, is an official portrait of King Charles II being presented with the first British pineapple, painted circa 1675:

At the same time, it became a favorite artistic motif, and so you’ll find it used on all kinds of contemporary objects, textiles, and architecture.  Most fantastically, Dunmore House, built in 1761 in Scotland, uses the pineapple to striking effect.

Rent it today!

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Yesterday, I took a lovely trip to Burlington and Plattsburgh.  As promised, Burlington made me miss Madison horribly, but I consoled myself with a ferry ride, elusive and non-Canadian flavors of Ben and Jerry’s, an enormous Lipsmacker that fits comfortably inside my closed fist, some no-longer-quite-so-ubiquitous bottles of Bath & Body Works hand soap, and of course Cheez-Its and Cooler Ranch Doritos.  I also walked out of Bath & Body Works with a home fragrance diffuser thingy, as our windows are hermetically sealed under a layer of shrink-wrapped plastic for the winter and I’ve grown paranoid about the slightly stale smell that the air tends to get at this point in the year.

And that is why I now have this plugged into my living room wall:

It’s not the Dunmore Pineapple, but it’ll do.

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