Yet it threw the older medium into crisis, removing at a stroke painting's unique capacity to bear witness.
Dependence, rivalry, envy, emulation: painting and photography, like members of a dysfunctional yet in-separable family, just cannot cast off lineages of influence and appropriation.
How these two media leapfrogged through the Victorian age, defining themselves against one another, is the subject of Tate Britain's exhibition Painting with Light.
Photography, from its appearance in 1839, looked to painting for fundamental models of depiction.