De Bangste Nacht van een Bouwmeester (The Fearful Night of a Master Builder)

This wood engraving satirizes architectural ambition through a nightmare vision: a master builder encounters grotesque, half-naked figures amid Gothic arches and mechanical wheels—symbols of his anxieties about construction, cost, and chaos. The Dutch print belongs to a rich lineage of political and social satire stretching from Hogarth's sequential narratives through Daumier's social commentary to German Bilderbogen sheets. Such engravings circulated widely as popular commentary on public figures and professional follies, employing exaggeration, symbolic scenery, and dialogue to mock their subjects. Here, the architect's interior demons materialize as absurd phantoms, a device that would influence later comic storytelling's use of fantasy and grotesquerie to expose human vanity and professional hubris.