In studies of modern Arab art generally and Lebanese art in particular, art stemming from the artist’s religious affiliation and art stemming from a humanist, secular nationalism are often assumed to be at odds due to their conflicting essences. Indeed, the rise of an art market has been taken by historians and art connoisseurs alike as a sign of secularization of the Arab world. Just as capitalism introduced the commodity which evokes individual desires and means, an imported bourgeois system of art production introduced fine art easel-painting which, it is said, evokes a particular kind of viewer-subject. Yet during the Nahda pious and humanist positions were not polarized. While Lebanese artists, for example, debated the relationship between piety, sect, and nation, they believed in an art that would reconcile all three. They envisioned something we could call secular piety that would unite aesthetically activated viewers in nation and faith, transcending emerging sectarian boundaries. At the same time that the Lebanese state was being organized along sectarian lines, capitalist systems of production and distribution were coming into being. Modern Lebanese artists provide an important means for studying the relationship between, citizenship, market, and aesthetic imagination. Generally, the aesthetic is subordinated in social analyses to political and economic structures, as if art is a mere epiphenomenon of social processes. What this assumption overlooks is the possibility that art forms actually participate in social debates and crystallize positions by offering alternate articulations. The paper will tackle changing notions of the meaning of religious belonging in nascent nation contexts by looking at the market for Arab-Lebanese nationalist landscape “views” as the production of a modern, secular piety that could address an inherent, physical aesthetically modern citizen. Data for the paper will be collected from archival sources, including exhibition catalogues, sales records, and artists’ diaries, as well as oral histories and object analyses. Art is a crucial subject for understanding any historical setting, especially one whose very icon has been the transformations in material culture. Study of art produced in the Nahda that is not based on the assumption of inherent categorical differences will give us a better sense of how art was productive of the Nahda.