Pears the most beautiful and noble of all

Description

I wanted to paint pears for their voluptuous shape, and I love to eat baked pears with ice cream. Pears are easy to carry and make a great item to include in lunch boxes.

According to Whitman and Mayhew (2012, p. 28), pears are native to Europe and Asia. In Greece, Homer considered pears a gift of the gods in the Odyssey and were thought to be sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Hera, the queen of the gods (www.growingfruit.org).  In France during the 13^th century, the city of La Rochelle became famous for growing pears for nobility, and King Henry III of England often ordered large shipments of pears to be brought across the English Channel to please his court.  The great medieval emperor Charlemagne ordered all his imperial cities to plant specific varieties of raw, cooking, and late-blooming pear trees (www.vyongewa.medium.com).  In Versailles, a head gardener known as Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie for King Louis XIV grew hundreds of pear varieties in the gardens of the Palace and declared that the fruit was the most ‘beautiful’ and ‘noble’ of all (www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com). From ancient East Asian origins, pears were historically tied to prosperity and in Japanese folklore, they were planted in front of homes to ensure that ‘evil and misfortune would not exist’ (www.natureevolutionaries.com). In Australia, pears first arrived with the First Fleet in 1788.  Pears are most visible in the Goulburn Valley around Shepparton, where following the World Wars, Italian and Greek migrants settled in the region to work the orchards (www.destinationgoulburnvalley.com.au).