Mirrors did exists since a long time though.
You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror".
Turns out photographic pictures did capture that "image in the mirror" picture. Funnily enough, using... Mirrors.
> ... or the photos that were painterly?
The answer is simply no. The real world doesn't work like that: photons/mirrors/prisms/our eyes "capturing" photons. Physics vs dialectic if you want.