De Actiesfinx springt van de berg (The Stock Market Sphinx Leaps from the Mountain)

This Dutch engraving satirizes the South Sea Bubble financial collapse through an allegorical scene of chaos and folly. A sphinx—representing blind speculation—plunges from a rocky peak as crowds of investors, nobles, and common folk scatter in panic below. The narrative prints at bottom, typical of Northern European broadsheet tradition, amplify the moral condemnation of greed and market mania.

The work inherits from sixteenth-century Reformation prints and Pieter Bruegel's moralizing compositions, establishing conventions the caricature tradition would refine: multiple vignettes depicting vice, exaggerated physical types marking social status, and Dutch text addressing a literate public. Such prints preceded Hogarth's sequential moral narratives by decades, anchoring the visual language of political and financial satire from which modern comics ultimately descend.