An alchemist's laboratory inhabited by monkeys: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after their obsessive, fruitless experiments. Etching by P. van der Borcht, ca. 1580.

Brinkman, loc. cit., explores the connections between the prints of an alchemist by Pieter Bruegel (1558) and by Maarten de Vos (1570), and this print by Van der Borcht, which reconstructs the scene as a singerie. He concludes that the present is the later, and loses some of the satirical symbolism of the first two, such as the alchemist throwing his last coin into his experimenting apparatus