Prior to photography the way of providing illustrations in publications was the use of engraving of the images. These were done with varying degrees of success. Some illustrations can be comic in their execution, others having elements of the design enhanced or interpreted by the engraver to make accurate attribution difficult.
Frequently the coins are represented perfectly round and have no semblance of reality to be able to compare to the model specimen.
An example of this approach may be seen in William Stukeley’s Medallic History of Carausius (1759). The coin illustrated above is an example of the jugate bust of Carausius and Sol. It may be an attempt to reproduce the British Museum coin below, also on Kennedy’s plate, as it is the only specimen of the type known to me and is, obviously, a contemporaneous illustration with the Kennedy engraving, but it exhibits a number of the issues identified above.
At the other end of the spectrum are coin plates engraved faithfully so that the original coin can be recognised a couple of centuries later.
As part of the preparatory work for an, as yet unpublished, introductory essay for a reprint of John Kennedy’s Dissertation upon Oriuna (1751) I was able to identify several coins that are in the Hunter collection, plus another one, the jugate Carausius and Sol, that is in the British Museum trays, because of the quality of the engraving compared to the others illustrated on Anne Robertson's Hunter collection plates.
Kennedy’s collection of coins of Carausius and Allectus, 256 of the former (including nine silver) and 89 of the latter, were purchased by a Mr Webb (John Webb, perhaps, who has coin sales noted in 1818 and 1822 in Manville) for the grand total of £86/10 when they came up for auction in 1760, before ultimately ending up in the Hunterian Museum.
The British Museum specimen illustrated on Kennedy's plate was not in his collection. The plate notes that it was in the collection of Richard Ellys (1683-1742), the third, and last, Baronet of Wyham and Whig MP for Grantham and then Boston. The British Museum records show that it was acquired from George Eastwood (1819-66) in 1863 and requires a little more work to demonstrate the ownership chain into that collection as the Ellys collection does not appear to have gone through the sale rooms, having consulted Manville auction reference. It may be that the collection largely remained in the descendants of his 2nd wife's remarriage into the Dashwood family as a numismatic sale from 25 July 1892, through the offices of Christie's, took place, although Manville notes it was English medals, plate and jewellery.
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 BM 1863,0325.4
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Finally you cannot discuss Kennedy's plate of coins without considering the coin that the work was about, the "Oriuna" Denarius. Here the engraving on the plate is a let down, particularly if it is compared to the engraving from Stukeley's Palaeographia Britannica III from 1752 and the actual coin from the Paris collection, or rather a cast of it. The large flan crack in the coin that was the cause of the misreading is not reproduced on the the Kennedy engraving.
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