Law as a Second Don Quixote, on Sancho's Gray Mule at the Ipot

This Dutch engraving ridicules John Law and his Mississippi Company financial scheme through a visual pun on Cervantes's Don Quixote. Law rides Sancho Panza's donkey surrounded by celebrating crowds, while classical allegorical figures gesture overhead and ships appear in the harbor—symbols of the speculative bubble and false promises of wealth. The print belongs to a vigorous European tradition of financial satire expressed through popular allegory and grotesque imagery. Produced during the collapse of Law's scheme, which devastated investors across France and the Low Countries, the work demonstrates how printmakers used literary references and dense symbolic detail to expose economic fraud to a broad public. This visual rhetoric of exposing folly through exaggerated character and scene directly anticipates the political caricature traditions of Hogarth and his successors.