The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire

A green pineapple-shaped dome stands on top of a red-brick building surrounded by foliage, accessed by a path cutting through the centre of the composition. Barbara Jones’ The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire depicts a ‘folly’ described in 1995 by Jack Stevenson (of the Royal Commission on the Ancient Monuments of Scotland) as ‘the most bizarre building in Scotland’. The building included a hothouse for growing pineapples; and was integrated into one of the garden walls of Dunmore Park, the ancestral home of the Earls of Dunmore, in Stirlingshire. It was commissioned by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, and built in 1761 by an unknown architect – possibly Sir William Chambers.

u2028This lithograph was produced as an edition of Jones’ illustration for her book Follies and Grottoes (Constable and Co, 1953). The author of numerous illustrated books, Jones is particularly known for The Unsophisticated Arts (1951). This was the outcome of a decade spent documenting everyday art throughout Britain, visiting fairgrounds, tattoo parlours, taxidermists, houseboats, high street shops, seaside piers and amusement arcades. Her ground-breaking achievement coalesced in the exhibition Black Eyes and Lemonade held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1951. Its impact on the younger generation of Pop artists has led to her becoming acknowledged as a ‘Mother of Pop’ by art historians Anne Massey and Catherine Moriarty. 

Trained as a mural painter, a number of Jones’ large-scale works were commissions, notably, for the Britain Can Make It exhibition at the V&A (1947); for the interior of ocean liners like the S.S. Orsova (1953); the International Labour Office exhibition in Turin (1961); and the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven (1966).