One of the ways in which the modern artist defends his independence from academic norms is through realism, understood as an unidealised description of the world. The nude being the culmination of academic apprenticeship, it is hardly surprising that it is also where this move against idealisation shows most. The human body displayed in its most material reality, therefore, went against the abstract canons of beauty represented in the classic nude. The ineluctable objectivity of photography, a new competitor of art in its own terrain, was to have an enormous influence in this realistic vision of the body.

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.