The painter-printmaker Félicien Rops specialized in controversial and explicit subject matter, and he received many commissions to illustrate books by such prominent writers as Théophile Gautier, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Charles de Coster, one of the foremost Belgian novelists of the nineteenth century. This print derives from an 1869 edition of de Coster's sprawling romance, The Legend and Adventures of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak. The inscription reads, "And he was hanged from the clapper of the bell, the one that had sounded the alarm."