A True Portrait of the Famous Monsieur Quinquempoix

This French engraving satirizes the financier and speculator John Law and the collapse of his Mississippi Company scheme. The dense composition shows Quinquempoix Street in Paris transformed into bedlam—figures trade worthless paper notes, fight over contracts, and descend into madness as fortunes evaporate. The engraving tradition of Hogarth and his predecessors here documents economic catastrophe as moral theater. Printed commentary in French frames the scene as cautionary spectacle. Such political-economic satire, distributed as single sheets across Europe, established the visual language inherited by nineteenth-century caricaturists and eventually by modern comic narrative: crowded panels, legible character types, the reduction of human folly to recognizable gesture.