From the exhibition
Spotprent op Pieter Witmond
· 1787

This Dutch etching satirizes a political figure through grotesque physiognomy and crude bodily humor—conventions inherited from Hogarth and Gillray. A woman stands atop a man's shoulders, pouring liquid into a vessel marked with initials, while handwritten annotations mock the subject. The print exemplifies 18th-century political caricature's reliance on exaggerated features, sexual innuendo, and class mockery to ridicule opponents. Such prints circulated widely in the Netherlands and German-speaking lands, establishing visual strategies that comic artists would refine: the caricatured face, sequential narrative, and text-image interplay.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/