Photography arrived at a point in the history of European painting when Romanticism was widely admired and commercially successful; realism, the painting of immediate visual experience, was beginning to coalesce into an oppositional movement. Neither of these painters saw photography as a threat to painting. They quickly embraced it as a means of referencing such details as facial expression, ephemeral light effects, and motion. Some painters, notably Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, themselves became accomplished photographers.
The fear that photography would replace painting was felt primarily by those who understood painting's purpose within a fairly narrow concept of visual representation. It can hardly be coincidence that a number of the photographers who achieved prominence in photography's first decades were trained in Delaroche's（a famous painter） studio, nor that the painting-photography relationship eventually emerged as the paradigmatic instance of the broader reciprocal one between art and technology.
By the late 19th century, many painters were using the camera as a tool. Its most obvious application was in portraiture, and in extreme cases the artist would simply over paint a photographic image faintly developed on sensitized canvas. Two successful Munich portraitists, Franz Lenbach (1836-1904) and Franz Stuck (1863-1928), used photography extensively to reduce sittings and speed production; Lenbach accumulated a photo archive of c. 13, 000 images, many of them taken by the Munich professional Karl Hahn.
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