Vreugde in Parijs naar aanleiding van het valse bericht van de dood van Willem III bij de slag aan de Boyne, 1690

The Triumph of Death was a fairly common theme for late medieval artists. Like the another theme, Memento Mori, it was intended to remind viewers of mortality and death. Triumph of Death often depicts an army of skeletons massacring people of every age and gender. Sometimes, a wild carnivalesque atmosphere was emphasized in the popular motif of the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death. Understanding the macabre spirit of death-culture in late medieval Europe requires an understanding of the terror and panic of epidemic disease, and, more generally, a fear of catastrophe and sudden death. The population of the medieval world experienced death first-hand: wide-scale death, physical decay, and the subsequent crumbling of societal infrastructure. The Black Death was the period in Europe from approximately 1347 to 1353, when bubonic plague ravaged and initiated a long-term period of cultural trauma. In fourteenth-century Europe, the mortality rate from plague was between 50% and 90% of those people who contracted the disease. The most recent works increase estimates of the total population loss to 65% in both Asia and Europe. Previous estimates state that about one-third of the population died from the disease in the years spanning the Black Death.

In art, mementos mori are artistic or symbolic reminders of mortality. Memento mori is a Latin expression meaning "remember that you have to die". It was then reused during the medieval period, it is also related to the ars moriendi ("The Art of Dying") and related literature. Memento mori has been an important part of ascetic disciplines as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife.

Casper and his father Luyken were extremely versatile and prolific artists. Jan and Casper Luyken worked for more than a hundred publishing houses and had an impressive number of patrons mainly to their versatility. Their production includes almost 4,500 prints, of which about one fourth are Casper’s work. The prints in the books they illustrated feature a great diversity of subjects and are often witty and full of details. Jan chose mostly pious and biblical subjects, whereas Casper depicted more worldly scenes. Casper Luyken was the eldest of the five children born to Jan Luyken and Maria de Ouden and the only one to reach adulthood. Casper learned the trade of illustrator from his father. His first illustrations appeared in the book Romeynschen Adelaer (1689) by Dirck Pietersz. Casper preferred working for his own clients rather than his father’s with one exception made for Jan ten Hoorn, his father’s biggest client. Together, they collaborated on only 36 prints. Casper probably left for Germany in 1699 to work for the engraver and art dealer Christoph Weigel in Nürnberg. In 1704, Casper returned to the Netherlands and died in 1708.