James Drummond Dole founded Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901. The ad agency for Dole was looking for something special for a national magazine advertising campaign; in exchange for an all-expense-paid trip, they asked Georgia O’Keeffe to submit two paintings from Hawai‘i. O’Keeffe became one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century. Best known for her still-life paintings, she painted natural settings at their most basic: large-scale flowers, bones and landscapes.
In Hawaiʻi, she was hosted by the Willis Jennings family (he was manager of the Hāna sugar plantation;) twelve-year-old Patricia Jennings became her companion and guide for the next ten days. O’Keeffe had produced 20-paintings, not one included a pineapple and she subsequently “submitted depictions of a papaya tree and the spiky blossom of a lobster’s claw heliconia” for the Dole ads.
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