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.

The ‘Orient’ is present in the bourgeois art and culture of the second half of the 19th century for two reasons. First, its discovery coincided with the imperialist campaigns of the European powers, who violently reduced the countries of north Africa to the level of colonies; secondly, for the European imaginary, a fantastic ‘Orient’ that was very different from the real thing became the place where passion, now lost in the vulgarisation of the metropolis, was still possible. Orientalism, in short, filled with consoling dreams, became one of the most commercial subjects of the new art markets.