The influence can be seen in its depiction of a mysteriously desolate building with classical architecture and distinct contrasts between light and darkness.

[1] André Glavimans wrote in Elsevier's Geïllustreerd Maandschrift [nl] in 1940 that the heavy smoke in the horizon is reminiscent of Joachim Patinir's paintings and that this almost had become a cliché in Willink's works.

[1] The Dutch writer Ferdinand Bordewijk based a prose poem on Château en Espagne.

[3] The poem describes the painting, explicates a contrast between decay and harmony represented by the house and the statue, and mentions an approaching storm.

In 2005, the literary scholar Mathijs Sanders connected these themes to the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler and Johan Huizinga, and to Menno ter Braak's defence of Willink as "an Apollonian painter, in whom the 'content' has been absorbed into the 'form', so that someone who unlawfully wants to separate the 'content' from the 'form' will only encounter emptiness and rhetoric".