Portret van Friedrich Christian hertog van Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg 1802

This is a portrait of Friedrich Christian, Duke of Augustenburg, made by Johann Daniel Laurenz II, sometime between 1770 and 1832. The image is an engraving. This is an important distinction from a drawing, as the lines you see here were achieved through a laborious, repetitive process. Laurenz would have used a tool called a burin to manually incise lines into a metal plate. Ink was then applied to the plate, and then wiped away, remaining only in the incised lines. The plate was then pressed onto paper, transferring the image. Think about the many hours of skilled labor that were needed to make this image – and the skilled labour involved in the mass production of paper at the time. This portrait speaks to the birth of modern media, where images could be reproduced at scale, and disseminated widely – a crucial development in the history of capitalism, politics, and culture.