Een Kermisprent: Het Droevig Relaas der Miserien (A Fair-Ground Print: The Sorrowful Account of Miseries)

This Dutch wood-engraved broadsheet satirizes the emigration of religious dissenters to America through sixteen sequential scenes of comic misadventure. Following the tradition of Hogarth's narrative prints and the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets, the artist traces a journey from hopeful departure through shipboard hardship, colonial disappointment, and economic ruin. The crude, densely-packed woodcuts employ exaggeration and physical comedy to mock both the emigrants' naïveté and their American destination. Working within popular print culture's long lineage of satirical sequences—inherited from 18th-century caricaturists and adapted by 19th-century comic broadsheets—this image presents emigration as folly.