Strijd tussen de Smullende Bubbel Heeren, en de Aanstaande Armoede (Struggle Between the Bubble-Devouring Lords and Coming Poverty)

This Dutch engraving satirizes the South Sea Bubble financial collapse through a chaotic street scene of luxury-consumed speculators confronting Poverty herself. Grotesque figures in fashionable dress feast and gesture wildly while skeletal Poverty looms with her insignia, her attendants wielding nets and weapons. The print exemplifies early 18th-century political satire's inheritance from Bruegel and its visual tradition of moral allegory—prosperity as bloated vice, ruin as skeletal consequence. Dense letterpress verses below amplify the comic grotesquerie. This genre of broadsheet social commentary, combining engraved image with explanatory text, established conventions that would flow through Hogarth's narrative sequences into Victorian caricature and eventually comic strip visual storytelling.