Turkse ruiter op een ezel (Turkish Rider on a Donkey)

This etching presents a seated figure in Ottoman dress mounted on a donkey, his lance pointed skyward, against a landscape with a fortified city. The composition mocks Eastern military pretension through crude contrast—the noble pose and ornate costume clash absurdly with the humble beast. Ethnic caricature was standard in early 18th-century Northern European prints, which portrayed Ottomans and Turks as exotic, ineffectual, or barbarous to audiences viewing them as geopolitical rivals. The work descends from a long tradition of topical satire distributed as cheap prints. Such imagery fed into the visual vocabulary later inherited by Hogarth, Gillray, and their successors, establishing how comic prints wedded text, exaggeration, and political ridicule—foundations on which the modern comic strip would build.