The painting illustrates Willink’s fondness of 17th century landscape painters such as Poussin and Lorrain. A 17th century painting, however, would never depict both a classicist palace and a factory in one landscape. Merging two images was a technique Willink frequently applied – creating credible images from a reality that did not exist. He depicts his view of the world, in this case presumably his view of Hitler’s Tausendjährige Reich as the seemingly untouchable palace, which suffered its first heavy defeat at the end of 1943. That year, Willink had named the painting The message and painted a horseman in the foreground. After the war, he removed it again.