By the late 19th century, realism had become the dominant school of thought in artistic circles. The advent of the camera was threatening to make other visual mediums virtually obsolete. There was really no argument that photographs were the best way to depict slices of life and landscapes exactly the way they might appear to the naked eye. Fortunately for painters, the camera didn’t allow artists to exert much creative control.

The impressionists managed to fill that niche quite nicely by imbuing nature scenes with specific emotions and internal perspectives. The idea of impressionistic art was not to make an exact duplicate of a real scene but rather to interpret it through the artist’s consciousness and experience. Suddenly the works of art being created on art easels were just as relevant as those being captured on tripods.