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About Escher

Escher Today

Here we tap into dates from M.C. Eschers life and work, jumping through time but always in the now. All year round you can enjoy background stories, anecdotes and trivia about this fascinating artist.

20 May 2026

Perfect perspectives in Up and Down

Escher’s fascination with the possibilities of perspective is already evident in his early prints. In these works, he combines the rules of classical perspective with an extreme vantage point. Later, he began to experiment more and used the rules of perspective to mislead viewers. In these works, the perspective lines are straight, but Escher realised that, in actuality, a curved line corresponds more closely to what our eyes see. In Up and Down, he achieves perfection in the application of curved perspective.

31 January 2026

Fool the eye

There has always been great interest worldwide in M. C. Escher's work. Articles about him and his art often speak of 'optical illusions’ and his work is almost automatically associated with that term. Understandable, even though the relationship between optical illusions and Escher's work differs from how optical illusions are generally explained.

3 January 2026

Escher in 2025

2025 has come to an end, and it has been another special and unforgettable year. These days, we are looking back on all the wonderful exhibitions and programmes we have had the privilege of organising. All the images we shared this year can be found in this special end-of-year animation. We thank everyone for their support over the past year and hope to inspire you again in 2026 with our stories and images!

20 December 2025

Parquet flooring on the move: from ballroom to theatre foyer

A special parquet floor has always been in the Ballroom of Lange Voorhout Palace. However, it was not always the one that is currently laid there, designed by American minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994).

22 November 2025

A tile tableau for and by Escher

Recently, Escher in The Palace and Kunstmuseum Den Haag were able to enrich their collection with a personal work by M.C. Escher: the tile tableau Fish and Birds from 1960, which hung in Escher's studio for many years.

18 October 2025

M.C. Escher's Word-Puzzle Wrapping Paper for De Bijenkorf

Doris Schattschneider, Escher expert and retired professor of mathematics, was a guest speaker at the annual Bridges mathematics conference. This year, the conference was held in Eindhoven in July. She presented her research into Escher's design for wrapping paper for the Bijenkorf department store, for which Escher turned to his hobby of what he called "word-puzzles".

7 August 2025

Letters full of admiration: a special loan

During his lifetime, M.C. Escher received several letters from enthusiasts sharing their admiration for his work. Not all of these have survived, which makes it very special when relatives lend such letters to a museum. The granddaughter of Hendrik Dekker temporarily loans his carefully written letter about the print Reptiles (1943) and Escher's reaction to it to Escher in The Palace. The handwritten correspondence will be on display from 18 March to 14 September 2025.

3 July 2025

A Bell Tower in the Twilight

For years, M.C. Escher lived in Rome, but he did not like to depict the city itself in his prints. Escher found Rome more beautiful by night, which led him in 1934 to make a large series of woodcuts and drawings entitled Nocturnal Rome. During this period, he also drew the Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The drawing led to a lithograph only two years later: S.S. Giovanni e Paolo (1936). Ten years later, he returned to the subject with his first mezzotint: Dusk (1946). At first glance, the lithograph and the mezzotint seem almost identical, but they certainly are not.

27 May 2025

More Than Neighbours: Albert E. Bosman & M.C. Escher

How to depict infinity on paper was something that fascinated both M.C. Escher and Albert E. Bosman. Albert Bosman (1891-1961) was an engineer and maths teacher who also became an artist. Mathematics lay at the core of his work. Bosman and Escher were neighbours in Baarn (NL), where they bonded over a mutual interest in mathematical shapes, ideas and principles. The two artists made abstract principles visually accessible to a wider audience. For the first time, their work is being shown side by side in M.C. Escher & Albert E. Bosman: A Mathematical Connection. Bosman’s best-known creation, the Pythagoras Tree, and the other drawings based on it are on show in this small but fascinating presentation from 21 February until 15 June 2025 at Escher in The Palace.

1 April 2025

Notable napkins

Escher in The Palace received a special donation: three napkins from the hand of artist and designer Chris Lebeau (1878-1945). These napkins, Refraction, Shoal of Fish and Apple, once belonged to M.C. Escher, and are on display until June 2025.

2 February 2025

The passing of Julie de Graag

The Latin expression ‘memento mori’, which means ‘remember you must die’, is a perennial theme in art. Julie de Graag literally made memento mori the subject of a print of the same name which she produced in 1916. Her reason for making such a print at that particular moment is clear. De Graag’s health problems regularly prompted bouts of depression, but it was the horrors of the First World War that caused her mental state to deteriorate further.

4 January 2025

Escher in 2024

2024 has come to an end and it has been another special and unforgettable year. These final days of the year, we look back on all the great exhibitions and programmes that we have organised.

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