De Vlaamse Brillenkramer (The Flemish Spectacle Seller)

This woodcut depicts a merchant hawking eyeglasses—a figure of ridicule in early modern satire. The peddler's exaggerated features, ornate costume, and theatrical pose mock commercial hucksterism. Surrounding vignettes show gulled customers and chimeras, typical of Northern European broadsheet satire. Such prints descended from 16th-century German Bilderbogen and anticipated the caricature traditions of Hogarth and Gillray. The genre merged social observation about fraud and folly with visual formulas—grotesque physiognomy, narrative chaos, moral lesson—that shaped later comic illustration and sequential art. The woodcut's crude lines and dense composition reflect popular print culture before refined lithography.