A personification of the South Sea Company, with people showing the effects of its collapse. Etching, ca. 1720.

The following is based on the British Museum online catalogue. Within an oval, a woman, representing the South Sea Company, reclines with a breast exposed against a table on which lie papers, including one reading 'Ik moet me na Vianen, neen, neen, ik bedekt my met het schil van Fred: Hend' (I must go to Vianen [a place of sanctuary], I protect myself with the shield of Frederik Hendrik [as an optimistic appeal to power]). She is attended by four putti, one representing fame, another playing a lyre; on the floor are ledgers recording large debts on South Sea Company shares

To the left are richly bound books representing the library of a ruined investor ("Biblioteek van een bedroefde actionist"), while to the right ships founder in the stormy South Pacific (identified by a label "Zuid Zé" held by a putto).

In the corners of the print outside the oval are four vignettes. Top left, a man on a platform ignores a barrel of herring, an Edam cheese and vegetables lying on the ground while he gorges himself on coins from a sack and defecates share certificates. The other vignettes apparently represent impoverished shareholders.Top right, a woman with a basket of dead geese encounters a man pushing a wheelbarrow or handcart full of stones: she appears to offer her geese in exchange for his stones, while a goose flies above with a barrel tied to its back. Lower left, four men dig a stony road leading towards a walled city. Lower right, a woman holding a fish addresses a swineherd

[Amsterdam] : [publisher not identified], [1720?]

1 print : etching, with engraving ; platemarks 17.3 x 30 cm (image) and 15.8 x 30.1 cm (verses)

De Zuid Zé Compagnie door wind in top gerezen Beklaagt nu haar verlies met een bekommerd wezen Translation of lettering: "The South Sea Company, risen to the top by means of wind, now laments her loss with a troubled existence." Below the image, Dutch verses engraved in three columns

'Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid', Amsterdam, 1720, is a collection of literary and pictorial satires relating to the Dutch speculation bubble of 1720, which occurred simultaneously with the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi bubble involving John Law. This print is one of the many in that collection: see A.H. Cole, op. cit.

Frederik Muller, De nederlandsche geschiedenis in platen. Beredeneerde beschrijving van nederlandsche historieplaten, zinneprenten en historische kaarten, Amsterdam 1863, part 2, no. 3556 (21)

British Museum, Catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. 2, London 1954, no. 1630

Arthur H. Cole, The great mirror of folly (Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid). An economic-bibliographical study, Boston 1949, no. 21

Wellcome Collection 812068i