From the exhibition
Offer van Noach en Noach door Cham bespot
· 1791

Two engraved vignettes from a Dutch–French illustrated Bible, printed in intaglio, present sequential Old Testament scenes from Genesis VIII and IX: Noah's burnt offering after the Flood, figures kneeling around a flaming altar in a rocky landscape; and Ham mocking his drunken, semi-clothed father Noah while a second son gestures away in shame. The captions appear in parallel Dutch and French, signaling a bilingual Protestant readership. These compact stacked picture-pairs belong to the *Bilderbogen* tradition of sequential religious illustration—numbered, captioned, narrative—that runs directly into the multi-panel comic strip. Hogarth's moral-series prints and the German picture-broadsheets of Neuremberg exploited the same grammar: image, caption, sequence, moral legibility. This page is an ancestor, not a cousin, of the comic book page.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/