De slapende boer van Stolwijk (The Sleeping Farmer of Stolwijk)

This Dutch engraving depicts a deathbed scene surrounded by eight smaller vignettes illustrating the farmer's life and moral failings. The central image shows mourners gathered around a dying man while supernatural figures loom above, likely representing his judgment. The surrounding scenes—showing drunkenness, gambling, infidelity, and other sins—employ the visual sermon technique common to 17th-century moral prints. This format anticipates the multi-panel narrative structure of later satirical sequences by Hogarth and Gillray. The work combines religious allegory with social critique, using the farmer's death as occasion to catalog rural vice. Such moralizing picture-sheets were precursors to the sequential storytelling that would eventually develop into the comic strip and graphic narrative traditions.