The Rise But Not Yet the Fall of John Law

This Dutch engraving satirizes the speculative fever surrounding John Law's Mississippi Company scheme. A central street scene shows crowds of investors and dupes, surrounded by sixteen smaller vignettes depicting the social chaos—from financial ruin to domestic collapse—spawned by get-rich-quick mania. The composition descends from Flemish and Northern European traditions of moral allegory and social criticism rendered in multiple narrative frames. Rather than a single joke, the print functions as a visual sermon on folly, greed, and social disorder, using exaggerated figures and dense symbolic detail. This method—combining architectural perspective with discrete episodes of vice and consequence—established a template that Hogarth would perfect in the 1730s and that defined satirical printmaking's role as social commentary for two centuries before comics inherited its narrative strategies.