Georgia O'Keeffe painted a pineapple after a 1939 commission in Hawaii.
The Hawaiian Pineapple Company invited O'Keeffe to Hawaii in 1939 to create images for an advertising campaign. She spent about nine weeks on the islands and produced paintings of tropical plants, flowers, and landscapes. The company wanted a pineapple image, but O'Keeffe initially found the fruit unappealing as a subject.
According to accounts of the commission, the company sent a pineapple to her New York studio after she returned. O'Keeffe then painted it, producing the work known as Pineapple Bud. The episode illustrates the tension between a commercial assignment and her independent artistic choices: she accepted the commission but did not simply make every image the sponsor requested while she was in Hawaii.
Her Hawaiian paintings were later shown at An American Place in New York in 1940. The trip is sometimes incorrectly associated with sugarcane because sugar production was also important to Hawaii’s economy, but the specifically commissioned fruit was the pineapple.