From the mid-1920s he turned to figurative painting, taking inspiration from Italian painters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Achille Funi and Felice Casorati.

[7] The depiction of Pompeii—a recurring symbol for decadence and ruin—and the presence of Spengler in the picture have made critics interpret Late Visitors to Pompeii as a fatalistic comment about Western culture in decline.

[8] The literary scholar Mathijs Sanders wrote in 2005 that Spengler's cyclical view of history, where every culture is born, blooms, decays and falls, is represented by the combination of Imperial Roman ruins and modern men in the same picture.

[2] Beginning with Victor Varangot in 1947, several critics have associated Late Visitors to Pompeii with works by the writer Ferdinand Bordewijk,[9] who openly based two of his stories on the Willink paintings The Yellow House and Chateau en Espagne.

[2] Varangot wrote that a theme of life and death expressed through the juxtaposition of two time periods in Late Visitors to Pompeii had influence on Bordewijk.

[2][9] Sanders argues that Late Visitors to Pompeii gave direct inspiration to Bordewijk's short story "Sodom; moraliteit van deze eeuw" (lit.

Sanders writes that both Late Visitors to Pompeii and "Sodom" express a belief that Western civilisation is in crisis, anchored in the cultural philosophy of Spengler's The Decline of the West.