Pierrot with Fruit

The fruit grower Edmond Couturier opened his shop on the Boulevard des Capucines across from Adrien Tournachon’s photographic studio in 1855. In a stroke of cross-promotional genius, the two proprietors realized they each had something to gain in an updated illustration of the adage, "seeing is believing." The photographer (then working under the moniker Nadar jeune) turned to his sessions with pantomime star Charles Deburau, the son and successor of Jean-Gaspard, who popularized the clown Pierrot at the Funambules theater. Transferred from the stage to the studio, Pierrot projects astonishment at the perfectly preserved fruit right in front of his eyes, thus acting as a proxy for the nineteenth-century dilletantes who crowded Couturier to view artfully arranged specimens in identically branded baskets. At the same time, Pierrot symbolizes the new and often surprising visibility of emerging technologies, in this case the horticultural science behind hastened and preserved fruits, and the photographic process that captured and conserved images. The two entrepreneurs enjoyed the fruits of their respective labor in this same year, 1855: Tournachon was awarded a gold medal for his photographs at the Universal Exposition, while Couturier took home the gold from the Universal Horticultural Exhibition.