The commissioned painted likeness

What ended was a service, not an art. Before 1839, anyone who wanted a record of a face paid a painter, most often a miniaturist working on ivory, and sat through several sessions. A daguerreotype took minutes and cost a fraction of that, and by the early 1850s Paris studios were producing portraits by the hundred thousand each year, while miniaturists at the height of their careers were pushed out of the trade or went to work tinting photographs. Painters still paint portraits, but as a commission chosen for the painter's eye rather than as the only way to keep a likeness. Deciding how a person should be shown, and signing that decision, never moved to the plate.