Exchange Bureau of Louis XIV

This Dutch etching mocks French financial corruption during the War of Spanish Succession. Two scheming figures—one holding a lantern labeled with fool's symbols, the other seated at a table of coins—traffic in worthless currency and fraudulent credit. The print employs grotesque facial exaggeration and caricatured body language typical of Northern European satirical practice. Such political etchings, combining text and image to attack specific abuses, established conventions that would flow through 18th-century English caricature (Hogarth, Gillray) and eventually into comic sequential art.