Whereas the landscape took second place under the old hierarchies, in the latter half of the 19th century it became the most important genre in painting. For one, as a byword for realism, and for another, as the image of the freedom of the artist who, having left the enclosed life of the academy, painted unfettered en plein air, ie in the open air. But this is also a terrain in which the competition from photography showed itself in the repetition of subject matter and formal resources... Pictorialism, a photographic movement that sought to ‘elevate’ photography to the category of art, found its chief subject matter in cloud-filled landscapes and backlighting.