De Actiewereld op haar einde (The Stock Market World at Its End)

This Dutch engraving satirizes the collapse of speculative finance during the South Sea Bubble crisis. A bearded sage presides over a scene of chaos: a well-dressed man crouches in despair while grotesque figures—including a fool in a tall hat and a woman with a scythe—cavort around him. The print employs exaggerated facial features and allegorical characters typical of Northern European satirical tradition, where financial folly and human vice merge into moral theater. Multiple text cartouches explain each figure's role in economic ruin. The engraving descends from Bruegel's densely populated morality scenes and anticipates the 18th-century print satire of Hogarth and Gillray. Such broadsheets circulated widely, combining visual caricature with dense commentary—a direct ancestor of modern sequential narrative and comic art.