Visvaarder (Fish Voyager)

Two monkeys in sailors' caps and red waistcoats crew a reed boat slung beneath a pufferfish that floats like an airship, because a puffer really does balloon up by gulping itself full of water until it swells. The monkeys are the key. Dressing apes as people has its own name, singerie, a genre that delighted 18th-century France, where whole rooms were painted with monkeys playing at being human in order to mock human vanity. Wiedijk crews his fish-balloon with these little imitators of mankind and floats the whole contraption on bubbles and balloons, a feather-light ship of fools that looks ready to pop at any second.