In the 1830s, the reformist Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II commissioned copies of his imperial portrait (taṣvīr-i hümāyūn) for display in schools, military barracks, and government offices. These large-scale oil-on-canvas paintings were hung with great pomp and circumstance in ceremonies which included military parades, prayers, sacrifices, musical performances, fireworks, and official processions that traced their way from the palace and through the landscape of Istanbul. In this paper, I argue that by analyzing these portraits within their ceremonial context, we can better understand how they operated as a focused source of ideological power within Mahmud II’s wider reform program. Since few physical examples of large-scale taṣvīr-i hümāyūn exist today, the primary methodology that I use in this paper is text-based comparative analysis. This approach differs from the analyses of art historian Günsel Renda, who has done extensive work on situating images of Mahmud II within the greater history of the genre of sultans’ portraiture. My analysis uses untapped primary sources, including archival documents, contemporary newspapers (primarily the Ottoman state-run gazette, Taḳvīm-i Vaḳāyiʿ), and the accounts of foreign travelers, to shed new light on the display, function, and intended audiences of the portraits. Throughout these text sources, the repeated use of phrases such as “miracle-showing,” “sun-like,” and “beauties showing,” refer to the portrait-object as well as the person of the sultan himself, drawing a clear proxy relationship between ruler and image. This relationship may be surprising given the long-held cultural reservations about the public display of portraiture stemming from the religious prohibition of the graven image, a point that did not escape contemporary Ottoman commentators. Nevertheless, descriptions of the portrait-installation ceremonies clearly demonstrate an attention towards representing an official version of appropriate Ottoman religious, bureaucratic, and military identities. As the ideal exemplar of these identities, the sultan-caliph-host – and his proxy portrait – acted as the fulcrum around which individual ceremonial components revolved. By sponsoring repeated iterations of the portrait-installation ceremony in different locations around the city, Mahmud II was inscribing his specific construction of modern Ottoman identity into the streets of Istanbul itself.