Practice question · Multiple choice
Photography arrived in 1839 and painting turned away from likeness over the following decades. What is the strongest version of the causal claim?
Hints
- Ask what a portrait painter had been selling, and who could now buy it for a fraction of the price.
- If the likeness job is taken, what is left that only painting can do?
Show the answer
C. Photography took over the documentary function more cheaply
Why
The portrait trade collapsed and the medium was released rather than defeated, which is why the change reads as reassignment rather than retreat. Delaroche's reported 'from today, painting is dead' names the panic; what followed was seventy years of painting asking what it alone could do.
Practise Modernism and the Avant-Gardes
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