Hawaiian Paintings Make Waves at Bonhams LA

Madge Tennent brought her modernist-trained eye when she visited Honolulu in 1923 and decided to stay.

The London-born, Paris-trained artist's 1940 portrait of an elegantly dressed native woman wearing a flowing traditional gown, known as a holokū, soared at auction on July 15.

Tennent’s The Red Holokū sold for $231,640 at Bonhams Los Angeles in a Hawaii-themed auction that also saw a second record-breaking result for a landscape by an artist who visited the islands in the late 19th century.

Enoch Wood Perry’s Kualoa Ranch, Oʻahu (1864-65) sold for $267,200. Like Tennent, Perry studied in Europe. In the US, he traveled extensively, and during a six-month stay in 1864, he painted landscapes on Oahu, Kauaʻi and Maui.

Georgia O’Keeffe was another artist who worked prolifically while visiting the island, albeit not in the way she had been commissioned to do.

During her nine-week stay in 1939, she painted 20 canvases inspired by Hawaii’s natural flora, including hibiscus and bird-of-paradise flowers, banana leaves, and papaya trees.

Dole, then known as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, had hired her to promote its product. Instead, she painted only one work, Pineapple Bud (1939), now in a private collection, that came close to fitting the brief.