[Upon first seeing a daguerreotype:] From today painting is dead.

Attributed to the French academic painter Paul Delaroche on encountering an early daguerreotype, the remark dramatizes the shock photography posed to traditional representational art. If taken at face value, it suggests that a mechanical image-making process capable of unprecedented detail and speed would render painting’s mimetic (reality-copying) function obsolete. The line is often cited as emblematic of 19th‑century anxieties about new technologies displacing older arts, though subsequent art history complicates the claim: painting did not “die,” but its purposes shifted, with many artists moving away from strict realism toward expressive, conceptual, and modernist aims.