ABSTRACT
The artist looks up from her work table, drawn out of her labours by a bearded male interlocutor who peers over her right shoulder. (Fig. 9.1) Ostensibly, this interruption has just occurred. Her right index finger is still frozen, ready to guide the line that her engraving burin will cut as her left hand steadies the copper plate before her. With her concentration broken from the pictorial work at hand, the artist’s gaze directs us outward and around her accomplishments that adorn the darkened workshop. We move from the print draped upon the rolling press at left, back around to the portrait in profile on the distant easel, which echoes the artist’s own visage. In juxtaposition to these past works, the rolling press and the bottle of aqua fortis ready on the table suggest how the artist will proceed in producing the kind of impressed image upon which we ourselves seem to be looking. Such reflexivity is clearly endorsed by the image itself. The outward-facing picture at the composition’s lower right reads as both a completed copper plate ready for printing and as a (flattering) mirror of the prospective beholder. From this seemingly humble vignette of workshop practice thus unfolds a synoptic vision of the production and patronage of impressed images – perhaps even of the eroticised fantasies of mechanical reproduction frequently attached to them in early modern Britain.1
