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From the exhibition

Een Kermisprent: Het Droevig Relaas der Miserien (A Fair-Ground Print: The Sorrowful Account of Miseries)

· 1847

Een Kermisprent: Het Droevig Relaas der Miserien (A Fair-Ground Print: The Sorrowful Account of Miseries)
This Dutch wood-engraved broadsheet satirizes the emigration of religious dissenters to America through sixteen sequential scenes of comic misadventure. Following the tradition of Hogarth's narrative prints and the German *Bilderbogen* picture-sheets, the artist traces a journey from hopeful departure through shipboard hardship, colonial disappointment, and economic ruin. The crude, densely-packed woodcuts employ exaggeration and physical comedy to mock both the emigrants' naïveté and their American destination. Working within popular print culture's long lineage of satirical sequences—inherited from 18th-century caricaturists and adapted by 19th-century comic broadsheets—this image presents emigration as folly.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/