ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 questions how later Stuart and Georgian contemporaries navigated the marketplace in monarchical engravings and how individuals “played” with pictures of the king. By exploring period treatises on printmaking, engraving collection, aesthetics, numismatics, and visual handicrafts, it demonstrates that printed pictures in early modern England were conceived of as durable expressions of loyalist political affection. Although likenesses of the royal family might be stamped upon pocket-sized sheets of flimsy paper or appropriated by individuals on different sides of the political spectrum, monarchical pictures were never trivial objects. They brought the spectacle of sovereignty to a wide audience, incorporating the monarchy within everyday spaces and the genteel leisure activities of men and women. Reproducible images commercialized and domesticated royal subjects, offering spectators the fiction of intimacy. But they also called self-referential attention to the act of looking, entangling subjects within a world of political gazes centered on the monarchy.
