I'm not an expert so I may be wrong about all this. But my impression is that Pictorialist photography aped painting for 50 years. Photography only came into its own as a "photography native" art form with Stieglitz and people like that around ~1905. By that time, non-representational painting styles like Cubism had already sucked the remaining juice out of painting, with Duchamp's 1917 urinal perhaps deserving credit for the coup de grace. Today painting is a shadow of what it once was - and public interest and auction prices reflect that. Museums occasionally have abstract painting exhibits but they're poorly attended because the public dislikes them. Ask a person on the street what their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old, possibly hundreds of years old. Compare auction prices between pre-1917 paintings and post-1917 paintings. Besides a few middlebrow pop artists like Dali or Warhol, meme painters like Pollock, or trendy political painters like Basquiat or Johns, the older paintings will be orders of magnitude more in demand. Painting used to move the conversation forward, now nobody cares.

>Painting didn't die from photography.

Commercial portrait painters died out pretty fast.