Den Door List en Geweld Aangevallen Leeuw (The Lion Attacked by Cunning and Force)

This Dutch etching uses anthropomorphic satire to depict political conflict during the American Revolution. A lion—symbol of the Dutch Republic—is surrounded by figures representing rival powers engaged in deception and aggression. The print exemplifies 18th-century political caricature's reliance on animal symbolism, allegorical figures, and sequential narrative panels to convey complex geopolitical struggle to a broad audience. Such imagery descended from Hogarth's moral sequences and fed directly into the pictorial satirical traditions that would shape early comics. The numbered scenes, text explanations, and mixed scales across the composition anticipate the panel-based grammar of modern sequential art.