Giving Tuppence

Oh, look, it's my two penn'orth of Brexit commentary! The sight of Big Ben under scaffolding in the background seems fairly appropriate. I suppose I could have gone the extra mile and put the EU stars on one of the shields, but I couldn't decide which was which, and besides, "a nation divided" and seemingly two-dimensional and pressed out of tin is about where we are. I should probably have sunk them in the Thames up to their necks, as well.

If you are familiar with our pre-decimal coinage, you may recognise these two: the reverse of an "old penny" always bore an image of Britannia. The one on the left is from a Victorian penny, the one on the right, with a distinct resemblance to Jane Austen, is from the 1797 "cartwheel" penny. I can't decide whether that's an olive branch she's brandishing, or some kind of lead-weighted cat o' nine tails... Perhaps the latter disguised as the former.

Leaden-footed satire aside, it's an interesting exercise, isolating the engraved image from an original about 1¼ inches in diameter. I don't use any specialised software for my extractions, just the standard Photoshop eraser tool, using a mouse. I do own a graphic tablet with a "pen", but never remember to keep it charged, and besides, three decades of using a mouse have given me a certain facility: it's a familiar tool in my hand. I find this yields a much more sensitive result than trusting an algorithm to identify edges, especially when the matrix or image background is confusingly similar. It also gives a usefully intimate knowledge of the subject, whether it be a statue in a museum or a relatively tiny coin. Above all, as in the case of these two pennies, it gives you a proper admiration for the skill of the original sculptor or engraver, as you follow each twist and turn in the curves and the changes of angle of attack. I can enlarge the scanned or photographed image to pixel level if necessary; at best, they worked with a magnifying glass. I can reverse a slip: they couldn't.

I'm reminded, getting up close with the 1797 Britannia, which I'm pretty sure will have been cut directly into the coin die, that William Blake was earning his living doing workmanlike engravings around that time. As Tom Phillips says in his recent TLS review of the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, "It is one of the pleasures of looking through books of the period to come across the words 'Wm Blake sculpt.' beneath a plate". However, and appropriately, perhaps, the engraver of the 1797 penny was Conrad Heinrich Küchler, a German immigrant working at the Soho Mint, in Handsworth. Now there's a pennyworth of irony.