Het graf van John Law (The Grave of John Law)

This etching depicts the collapse of John Law's financial schemes during the Mississippi Bubble crisis. Skeletal figures and demons swarm around a tomb as crowds mourn and celebrate—a scene mixing Christian iconography with grotesque chaos. The print exemplifies early 18th-century Dutch satirical tradition, where complex allegorical scenes condemned financial fraud and greed through grotesque imagery and crowded compositions. Law's scheme, which promised vast wealth from Louisiana colonization, instead ruined thousands of investors across Europe. Such political-economic satires descended from Bruegel and prefigured the elaborate caricature work of Hogarth and Gillray. The dense, moralizing visual narrative and exaggerated human forms established conventions that would shape European printmaking and eventually influence modern comic art's approach to social criticism through caricature and visual excess.