Ziet Steven van der Klok: Met al zijn groote daaden / Waar mee hy was voorzien / en vol op mee beladen 1787 - 1822

This broadside, whose title translates roughly to "Here lies Steven van der Klok, with all his great deeds," was printed by Jan Hendrik de Lange in Deventer. As a "work printer," de Lange likely made his living producing inexpensive printed matter for local consumption. The image is made from a woodcut, a relief printing process where the artist carves away the negative space around a design. This is a relatively quick and cheap way to reproduce images, well suited to ephemeral objects like this one. You can see the way the linear marks have been laboriously cut into the block, giving the images a graphic, vernacular feel. The scenes, arrayed like panels in a comic strip, recount the deeds of a man named Steven van der Klok. Each little vignette is printed from the same block, yet tells its own story. This is a form of early graphic storytelling, made possible by the industrialization of image-making. It is an interesting blend of craft production and proto-mass culture.