Het Groote Blinde-Koetje Spel (The Great Blind Man's Buff Game)

This Dutch wood engraving satirizes the Dutch Finance Ministry during a period without a minister. Well-dressed officials and politicians stumble about blindfolded in a children's game, their fumbling incompetence rendered absurd through physical comedy. The composition descends from eighteenth-century British satirists like Gillray and Rowlandson, who used exaggerated body language and social disorder to mock institutional failure. The print reflects the popular European tradition of political caricature—whether Daumier's lithographs or German Bilderbogen sheets—that made governmental malfeasance legible through visual grotesquerie. Here, the blindfold becomes the central metaphor: those in power cannot see, cannot lead, cannot govern. The work demonstrates how sequential visual narrative and comic distortion became tools for political critique before becoming the language of modern comics.