De Herschepping der Professoraale Kees (The Reshaping of Professor Kees)

This Dutch satirical print uses dramatic scale contrast to mock an educational figure, showing a diminutive student before an absurdly enlarged authority. The engraving tradition—descended from Hogarth and Gillray—here channels popular Dutch political humor through caricature and visual hierarchy. The text below, in vernacular Dutch, addresses the print's subject directly, a common device in 18th-century Netherlandish satire. Such prints circulated as affordable, widely understood commentary on public figures and institutional pretension, establishing visual conventions—exaggeration, symbolic objects, hierarchical composition—that would become foundational to later political cartooning and eventually sequential comic art.