Broadside Against Captain Jacques Colaert of Dunkirk

This Dutch printed broadside attacks Jacques Colaert, a privateer captain operating from Dunkirk during the Thirty Years' War. The page combines verse satire with woodcut illustration—a format inherited from German Reformation picture-sheets and perfected by Northern European printers. Broadsides like this were cheap, portable propaganda, distributed to mock political and military figures. The alternating voices of Matroos (Sailor) and Colaert create a mock dialogue typical of period satire. Such vernacular prints, preceding Hogarth by a century, established the tradition of visual-verbal mockery that would evolve into the caricature prints of Gillray and Rowlandson, and ultimately into sequential comic narrative.