De Lachende Law, de Treurende Actonist en de Smekende Mercurius

This Dutch engraving satirizes the South Sea Bubble financial collapse through personified figures: a laughing Law, a weeping Actonist (investor), and a pleading Mercury (commerce). The composition depicts chaos—scattered documents, gesturing crowds, ships at sea—rendered in the Northern European tradition of moral allegory prints. The three-column Dutch text below elaborates the satire's economic and social critique. As financial disasters bred visual satire across Europe, such engravings prefigured the biting political caricature of Hogarth and Gillray, establishing the print as a vehicle for public commentary on power, greed, and folly. These proto-comic narratives merged text and image to reach literate and semiliterate viewers alike, establishing conventions the modern comic strip would inherit.