The South Sea Company with Avarice on a Chain

This Dutch engraving depicts the South Sea financial collapse through allegorical theater. Avarice, chained but dominant, presides over a chaotic scene of speculators, the wealthy, and the ruined—some prostrate, others gesticulating in panic. Classical architecture frames the disaster as a moral spectacle. The print exemplifies early 18th-century political satire's reliance on personified vices, contemporary dress, and architectural grandeur to expose financial fraud. The four-column text below provides explanatory verse, typical of Northern European broadsheet tradition. This work belongs to the lineage of Hogarth and later Gillray, where engraving merged visual allegory with social commentary—ancestors of the editorial cartoon and sequential narrative art that would evolve into modern comics.