Hollands Hollende Koe (Holland's Running Cow)

This etching depicts a chaotic satirical scene in which a crowned cow—representing the Dutch state—is milked and ridden by figures in elaborate dress while attendants gesture wildly around her. The composition draws from the Northern European tradition of political allegory, where animals embodied nations and their follies. The dense narrative, rendered in fine etching lines, incorporates Dutch text below explaining the allegory's targets: political corruption, mismanagement, and social disorder. The print exemplifies late-seventeenth-century print satire's fusion of visual caricature and textual commentary, a form that would evolve through Hogarth and Gillray into the modern graphic narrative.