De Begeerlijkheyt Zoekt de Fortuin t'Achterhalen of Voor by te Loopen (Greed Seeks to Overtake Fortune)

This Dutch engraving depicts a chaotic landscape where figures pursue Fortune personified—a common allegory in early-18th-century print satire. The composition, rendered in fine-line engraving, teems with dozens of characters engaged in trade, deception, and folly, their activities labeled with moralizing verse beneath. The work belongs to the Northern European tradition of densely narrative moral prints, precursor to Hogarth's serial compositions and the satirical broadsheets that flourished through the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather than targeting a single political figure, the print surveys human avarice and social disorder across classes, using the language of allegorical emblem and folk morality—the visual vocabulary from which later political caricature and comic-strip narrative would develop.