De slapende boer van Stolwijk

This engraved broadsheet combines a central narrative scene with eight surrounding vignettes—a format descended from Northern European picture-sheets. The composition depicts a rural episode: a sleeping farmer and the comic chaos that ensues when village figures gather around his bed. The surrounding ovals show related scenes of consequence and reaction, guiding viewers through the story's moral arc.

Part of a robust tradition of popular prints that preceded modern comics, such broadsheets circulated among literate and semi-literate audiences, using sequential imagery and accompanying text to satirize peasant life, foolishness, and social disorder. The engraver captures recognizable rural types and local behavior—stock subjects for 18th-century satire—establishing visual and narrative conventions that would later shape illustrated newspapers, caricature sequences, and eventually the comic strip.