De Inbeelding: Heerseres van't Rookverkopers-gild (The Image: Mistress of the Tobacco Sellers' Guild)

This Dutch engraving satirizes the Mississippi Company bubble, the financial collapse that devastated European investors in 1720. A female allegorical figure presides over a chaotic scene of speculators, fortune-seekers, and the desperate poor, while attendants distribute worthless stock certificates. The composition descends from Bruegel and Bosch's panoramic moral scenes; its tradition of visual satire through crowded, annotated prints would influence later caricaturists like Hogarth and Gillray, establishing conventions that flow into modern comic art: dense narrative panels, numbered references, and social critique through grotesque exaggeration.