From the exhibition
De knechten van de actionisten lopen met de koekepan (The Servants of the Actionists Run Off with the Cookpan)
· 1720

This Dutch woodcut satirizes financial speculators during the early eighteenth-century stock bubble. Three panels show figures fleeing with a cookpan—a metaphor for theft and economic fraud. The accompanying verse dialogue mocks the Actionisten (stock traders) and their servants who profited from worthless shares while ordinary citizens lost savings. Rendered in the tradition of popular broadsheet satire, the print combines crude woodcut imagery with pointed social commentary, targeting greed and class resentment. Such picture-sheets with integrated text and sequential scenes prefigure later comic traditions, from German Bilderbogen through to modern graphic narrative, establishing the visual and verbal strategies still used to ridicule power and expose financial deception.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/