John Law in a Wheeled Chair Before the Lazarus House

This Dutch etching satirizes the financial collapse of John Law's Mississippi Company scheme. A richly dressed Law sits enthroned in a wheeled chair—a symbol of helplessness—while crowds of ruined investors, beggars, and the disabled surround him outside a poorhouse. Allegorical panels above show his rise and fall. The print exemplifies early 18th-century political satire's merger of financial critique with visual mockery: exaggerated features, symbolic props, and layered moral commentary packed into a single frame. Such works descended from Hogarth's sequential narratives and prefigured the caricature traditions of Gillray and Rowlandson, establishing visual satire as a tool for public dissent. The equation of financial villainy with physical degradation and poverty reflects period anxieties about speculation and class upheaval.