[3] Croegaert painted initially highly detailed still lifes, bird and flower subjects, and occasional outdoor genre scenes.

[2] He built a career with his salon portraits of glamorous young women dressed in sumptuous fabrics set in luxurious rooms.

He also gained a reputation as the leading artist in the genre of 'cardinal paintings', humorous representations of cardinals engaged in various mundane activities in lavish surroundings.

[5] By the late 1860s there was a ready market for genre scenes with bourgeois figures, usually young glamorous women, depicted in sumptuous surroundings.

[6] With the onset of the Belle Epoque in the 1870s, this type of paintings depicting fashionable women set in an interior became popular at the Paris Salon.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Croegaert painted a series of small portraits of women rendered in a highly realistic manner.

Others who made a name in the genre include the Italian Andrea Landini and the Frenchmen Jehan Georges Vibert, Charles Edouard Delort and Marcel Brunery.