Satirical Print on James II's Departure to Ireland

This Dutch etching mocks King James II's flight to Ireland during the Glorious Revolution. A crowd of figures—soldiers, courtiers, and common folk—gestures in ridicule as the departing monarch is ferried away. The printmaker uses the vocabulary of Northern European print satire: exaggerated poses, inscribed speech scrolls, and dense narrative detail packed into a single compositional field. Such prints descended from Bruegel and flowered through the 17th century in the Netherlands and Germany, establishing conventions—caricatured faces, social types rendered as comic grotesques, political commentary through visual distortion—that would dominate European satirical printmaking through Hogarth, Gillray, and into the modern comic tradition.