Prints, drawings and applied art

Often, it is the highlights within an artist’s oeuvre that attract most attention. Which is logical, as they are representative of the artist at his very best, having found his style and surpassing his early work. But does this imply that his early work is unexciting? Quite the contrary. Escher’s early works exude something of the artist he will go on to become in due course

Escher created several skulls and skeletons, both as standalone works and as part of a poster or a monogram. This is the very first one, from January 1917.

Mauk and his good friend Bas Kist shared  a great love of drawing. On 7 January 1917, they visited the painter Gert Stegeman (1858–1940), who had a studio with a printing press above the Sabelpoort in the centre of Arnhem, not far from the HBS. It was here that Escher learnt woodcarving. At home, he and his brothers had already been taught woodworking, so working with wood was nothing new to him. It was at Stegeman’s that Escher also produced his first etching: Railway Bridge over the Rhine at Oosterbeek

An article by former curator Micky Piller on the 12 self-portraits created by Escher.

On 6 September 1919 Maurits Escher started his lessons at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Within as little as a week he had already made a radical decision: he would switch from architecture to graphic arts.

Escher in Het Paleis is always on the lookout for works by M.C. Escher to enrich the collection. For years, our wish list has included a small number of Escher prints that we do not yet own, but these are rare and difficult to come by. High on the list was Escher’s woodcut White Cat (1919), a tender work that Escher created of his pet during his student days in Haarlem.

Via Richard Roland Holst, professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, Escher ended up at the Haarlem School of Architecture And Decorative Arts. On the recommendations of his father, Escher embarked on a degree course in architectural engineering. No sooner had he been accepted onto the course, or he presented his work to Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, the famous graphic artist who lectured in printmaking in Haarlem. 

If you perceive the world as a never-ending story with a rich variety of repetitive patterns, then tessellation is the ideal pictorial device to apply. Tessellations are patterns of identical shapes that seamlessly interlock and can be repeated endlessly. The complexity of this process is revealed in one of Escher's earliest tessellations, which he made in 1922 before his first visit to the Alhambra, the Spanish-Islamic citadel and palace in the Spanish city of Granada. 

After completing his printmaking studies in Haarlem in 1922, the young Escher embarks on his second trip to Italy. He is accompanied by his closest friends, Jan van der Does de Willebois and Bas Kist. Tuscany is hilly and breathtakingly beautiful. In 1922, the towns and cities had not been as lavishly restored as they are today. A medieval town such as San Gimignano, nestled between Florence and Siena, had not yet been discovered by coach tour operators and hordes of tourists. The small central square was still a village square.

On 20 October 1922, Escher created a drawing that — in retrospect — would have a major impact on his life. He made his first voyage by freighter that autumn, from Amsterdam to the Spanish port city of Málaga. The ship also moored in Alicante and Taragona, after which Escher traveled by train to Barcelona, Madrid, Avila,Toledo and Granada. There he visited the beautiful Alhambra.

13 August 1923 saw Escher’s first solo exhibition open at the ‘Circolo Artistico’ in Siena. A milestone, but he paid very little attention to it. He was in love with Jetta Umiker and all his thoughts and actions were focused on her.

Maurits Cornelis Escher saw something very special in the iconic palm tree. He has never commented on it, but it is striking how often it recurs in his work. The first of these was created in July 1923—a stylised palm tree with fronds like parasols, hanging bunches of palm fruits, the scaly trunk and a halo that seems to surround the tree.
 

In 2015, Escher in The Palace was able to buy a wonderful, previously unknown, composition on paper that Escher made in March 1924. The subject is a little town on a steep hillside. Escher created this surprisingly large work of art with India ink and pencil.

In this woodcut the gigantic raven stands out, looming protectively over the radiant saint. On a cliff some howling wolves look down in frustration. Escher complements the composition with a town that can be seen in the depth.

The Fall of Man shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden at the moment they have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden. They were tempted by the devil in the form of a serpent, who first convinced Eve, before Adam too ate the forbidden fruit. Escher depicts the two just after Adam has eaten from the apple and is sitting on the ground in dismay, knowing they have made a grave mistake.

The Escher archive at the Kunstmuseum The Hague (formerly Gemeentemuseum) contains a small storybook from 1898, Escher’s birth year. He read from it to his sons a lot. Given the publication date, one might well imagine that his father had done the same for him. The storybook features a story that served as the inspiration for a woodcut from January 1928: Castle in the Air.
 

To create confusion. That was what God had in mind when he made the people who were building a tower to heaven all speak different languages. In no time at all, it was chaos, and the construction was stopped immediately. If you can no longer talk to each other, how can you continue to build together at such a height?

In June 1928, Escher travelled to the French island Corsica with his father-in-law Arturo Umiker. In customary fashion, Escher made drawings of this journey for prints he would create later in the year. In October 1928 this resulted in the woodcut Bonifacio.
 

Escher visited the desolate island of Corsica several times. He was fascinated by the rock formations, the dizzying elevations, the mountain ranges, chasms, rivers, bays and coastline. He was specifically enamoured with the north-eastern town of Calvi and its massive citadel. This 15th century Genoese stronghold is situated on a rock on a headland and dominates the harbour and boulevard of the city.

Between 1927 and 1938, the Escher family spent almost every summer in the Swiss town of Steckborn, with Jetta’s sister Nina and her husband Oskar Schibler. In the spring of 1929, Escher had already made a trip to the Italian Abruzzo region. The tour yielded 28 drawings, one of which he developed into a lithograph in Steckborn, the first one of an Italian landscape.
 

Belvedere (1958), a favourite with our visitors, has a magical power that touches millions of Escher fans around the world. What appears at first to be simply a fantastical building turns out to be an impossible structure. It is not only the foreground of the print that has been a mystery. For many years, the landscape in the background was too. 

In November 1929, Escher produced a print that for once was not the direct result of a journey he had made that spring. From 1925 to 1936, he followed a fixed pattern of travelling through Italy in the spring. In the autumn and winter following these trips, he fleshed out his sketches and photos into prints. But in May 1926, things were different.
 

While living in Italy, Escher spent virtually every spring undertaking long journeys on foot through a region of Italy. In those days, mountain walking was still a real adventure, much more so than today. In 1929, Escher and a friend, the Swiss painter Giuseppe Haas-Triverio, embarked on a journey through Abruzzo, the mountainous region to the east of Rome. Escher was planning to produce an illustrated book of Abruzzo and its towns. This never materialized, but he did manage over the years to create a number of drawings on which he based prints, depicting the towns of Abruzzo.

Escher not only observed the countryside, he was also a keen walker. When he first arrived in Italy, Escher spent every spring undertaking long journeys through different parts of the country. In 1930, he and two friends, accompanied by a mule, embarked on a journey through Campania and Calabria in Southern Italy. In customary fashion, he made drawings of the places he visited, possibly to be incorporated into later compositions. On 23 May 1930, they reached the small town of Morano, nestled between the mountains.

On his journeys through untouched parts of Italy in the spring and summer, enjoying himself was not Escher’s only aim. These hikes were also very much geared towards preparing for prints that they might inspire. In doing so, he almost always takes reality into his own hands. A good example is the Cattolica di Stilo. 

On 22 May 1930, Escher and his travelling companions were in the town of Rossano in Calabria. They visited the Oratorio di San Marco, an oratory from the 10th century that is one of the most important examples of Byzantine art in Italy.

The autumn and winter months of 1930-1931 were a productive period for Escher. In the spring he travelled through the Italian provinces of Campania and Calabria, after which he produced a whole series of woodcuts and lithographs in the autumn. 13 in total. These works bear the poetic names of the places he visited: Palizzi , Morano, Pentedatillo, Stilo, Scilla, Tropea, Santa Severina, Rocco Imperiale, Rossano.

In the autumn and winter of 1930-1931, Escher developed the sketches he had made and photographs he had taken during his spring trip through the Italian provinces of Campanile and Calabria together with his friends Giuseppe Haas-Triverio, Roberto Schiess and Jean Rousset. He was so impressed by the mountain village of Pentedattilo that he produced two woodcuts and a lithograph of it.

Former curator Dunja Nadjézjda Hak discusses Escher’s Emblemata and the subsequent history of this genre, which emerged from a collaboration between an artist and a writer

The Emblemata series consists of 25 woodcuts, including Butterfly. In this woodcut Escher puts a butterfly (a small tortoiseshell, a swallowtail, who knows?) in a richly ornamented palette of flowers and plants. Art historian G.J. Hoogewerff provided these Emblemata with a motto in Latin and a poem in Dutch.

Around 1930, Escher was not a happy man. He struggled with his health, he was unable to sell his work, he had financial difficulties, and he lacked inspiration. He even thought about completely ending his artistic career. It was the art historian G.J. Hoogewerff who drew him out of his dip.

Between March and June 1931, Escher created his Emblemata, a series of small woodcuts that were accompanied by a motto in Latin and a poem in Dutch. One of those prints is Retreat. It features a birdhouse, hanging from a tree. An innocent image suffused with new significance by the title.

The Collegiata di Santa Maria Maddalena, the church in the small Italian seaside resort of Atrani is probably one of the most iconic churches to feature in the work of M.C. Escher. This lithograph itself may not be as well known, but the building with the distinctive bell tower has gained world-wide fame because of the three Metamorphoses. 

Escher was very fond of the jagged and vertical landscapes he encountered in Abruzzo and Calabria, on the Amalfi coast, on Sicily and on the French island of Corsica. He traversed these areas in a variety of ways for many years. There was one place in particular that he kept returning to: Atrani.

In the spring of 1931, Escher and his wife travelled together along the Amalfi coast, an area of which they both had fond memories, not least because they met there in 1923. One of the prints produced as a result of the trip is San Giovanni, Ravello (in Campidoglio), Ravello. 
 

On 22 April 1932, Escher and his friend Giuseppe Haas-Triverio left for Sicily for a month. An island that was new to the both of them. One of the areas they visit is the Madonie, a mountain range in Sicily whose highest peak is Pizzo Carbonara; at almost 2,000 metres, it is the second-highest in Italy (after Mount Etna). It is a beautiful area with lush nature and a number of ancient towns and villages.

In June 1932, Escher was commissioned by the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome. The institute wanted to devote attention to a church whose visibility was threatened by the emerging new building sites in the capital. In the lithograph that Escher produced of San Michele dei Frisoni (the Frisian Church), he allows himself a considerable degree of artistic licence. He does not depict the current version of the church (built in 1141). Instead he portrayed the original version, which was destroyed by the Normans in 1084.

Escher visited Sicily for the first time in the spring of 1932, together with his friend and painter Giuseppe Haas-Triverio. From Palermo they travelled to the coast, circled Mount Etna, to Randazzo and visited the lava formations at Bronte. On 17 May they spent several hours at the - never finished - temple at Segesta. Escher enjoyed himself but he also looked for the best angle from which he could capture the Doric temple. 

Escher's fascination with the sea occasioned a couple of his finest works. Never have I seen the moonlit sea depicted quite as I have in Lichtende zee (Phosphorescent Sea) from 1933. Waves roll silently towards the shore. Stars pepper the black sky, white crests shine in an inky sea. Back then, Escher got to see what a lot of Dutch people saw at the coast the previous summer, something that caused a stir: sea sparkle. 

Doris Schattschneider, an Escher expert and retired professor of mathematics, was a guest speaker at the annual mathematics conference known as Bridges. This year, the conference took place in July in Eindhoven. There, she presented her research into Escher’s design for gift-wrapping paper for the De Bijenkorf department store, for which Escher drew on his hobby of what he called ‘word puzzles’.

Escher was a hiker and an observer. Fortunately, these two pursuits go hand in hand. In his Italian years, Escher went on a long hike every spring through areas such as the Abruzzo and Calabria, which were still quite inhospitable. While doing so, he looked around in awe and contemplated the beautiful nature and idiosyncratic landscape that he found there.

In May and June 1934, Maurits and Jetta had made another trip to the Amalfi coast from their home in busy Rome. They had been married for 10 years and were visiting places where they had been together before. One of these was Positano. In the lithograph he produced of the coastal town, the typical white-plastered vertical houses can be seen with stairs and so-called ‘bread roll roofs’ that were then common in central and southern Italy.

Maurits, Jetta and their two sons spent the summer months of 1934 in the artists’ village of Saint-Idesbald. During this holiday in Belgium, they also visited the cities of Ghent, Bruges and Tournai. Escher produced a woodcut of the cathedrals of Ghent and Tournai during that very same holiday.

Escher also produced a woodcut of Tournai Cathedral that summer.

In Grasshopper, Escher depicts this winged insect in exquisite detail, showing its powerful hind legs, compound eyes, antennae and folded wings.

Scarabs are a subfamily of dung beetle. They collect dung from herbivores, like horses and camels, which they form into balls and lay their eggs in. Scarabs were revered as sacred in Egyptian mythology because Egyptians believed they erupted from these dung balls spontaneously. 

Directly above the Trastevere district on the west side of the Tiber River, the Gianicolo (or Janiculum) towers above the city of Rome. This hill offers fantastic views over the city and is a favourite destination for locals. This  must have been the case for Escher as well, especially the park around the Villa Doria Pamphili. Here, in the largest public park in Rome, he was able to escape the noise and chaos of the city.

The period between 1934 and 1936 is widely recognised as a time of great transition in the artistic oeuvre of M.C. Escher. Gradually shifting his focus away from interpretations of Italian landscapes, Escher began to look for something new to incorporate into his work. This quest resulted in an approach that would become one of his best-known specialisms: merging worlds that do not, or simply can not, co-exist and bringing them together in a single image.

On 4 July 1935 Escher and his family moved from Rome to the Swiss town Château-d'Oex, after which he travelled to the Netherlands almost straight away to arrange things for a long stay in Switzerland. Between all these visits he spends three weeks working on a very detailed, loving portrait of his father. 

In September 1935 Maurits Cornelis Escher made a woodcut for his cousin Anne Escher (1895-1971), the founder and director of engineering company Ir. Escher's Constructiewerkplaatsen en Machinefabriek N.V. The company, founded in 1925, would grow into a major metalworking company, which by the 1950s had the largest factory hall in The Hague.

Escher’s work has a stranger in its midst. Escher is always described as a one-man art movement. An artist who doesn’t subscribe to art movements, trods his own path and didn’t copy anyone else’s work whatsoever. But for one artist he made an exception: Jheronimus Bosch.

In the 1930s, M.C. Escher too found himself irresistibly drawn to Etna. He first visited Sicily in the spring of 1932, together with his friend Giuseppe Haas-Triverio. Together they returned in May 1935 and the following year he was there again, this time alone. The volcano was a regular stop on every trip. Logically, the cone dominates the landscape on the east side of the island.

After consulting Jetta, Escher decided in early 1936 to write to an Italian shipping company to explore the option of taking a tour of the Mediterranean. In lieu of payment, Escher offers to create prints for a “propaganda booklet”. Their proposal is accepted. During the journey, Escher makes several drawings for his prints. Freighter is one of the woodcuts to emerge. Escher's 1936 photo album contains a photo of Escher in his plus fours, drawing on the deck of a boat.

On 27 April 1936 Escher embarks upon the freighter Rossini from the Italian town of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia). Earlier, he had travelled from his residence Chateau d’Oeux to Trieste by train. With the Rossini he travels to Venice, Ancona and Bari. From 2 to 4 May he visits the Sicilian harbour town of Catania.
 

The Piano di Sant'Andrea is an historic site of ancient Genoa situated on top of a hill of the same name. In the Middle Ages, this was an essential gateway to the city. At the foot of the towers lies the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Escher visited Genoa and the Piano di Sant'Andrea in the spring of 1936.

Between 26 April and 28 June 1936, Escher took a round trip by freighter along the shores of Italy and Spain. He also travelled inland by train. His wife Jetta accompanied him on a section of this trip. In Pisa, he made a drawing of the famous tower and the cathedral next to it. To do so, he had climbed the first flight of steps, resulting in a viewpoint you don’t often see.

Maurits and Jetta did not just have a great time during their trip across and around the Mediterranean Sea in the spring of 1936, their journey also proved to be a great source of inspiration for the artist. Still Life and Street is based on this trip too. It started with a drawing of a street in the coastal town of Savona, which he did on 10 June.

While the Escher family were living in Château-d'Oex, Switzerland, Maurits met the painter John Paschoud. On 6 January 1937, their joint exhibition opened in the painter’s studio. Escher exhibited thirty-eight woodcuts and lithographs there.

S.S. Giovanni e Paolo, Rome (1936) and Dusk (Rome) (1946) are two prints that are often confused with one another. Looking at the images, it is easy to see why. Both of these small prints depict the belltower of the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Rome at dusk. Though they are mirror images, they appear nearly identical. 

Lizards had fascinated him for quite some time, but in the summer and autumn of 1956, Escher was particularly occupied with them. This fascination came not so much from the behaviour or way of life of these creatures, but from their distinctive form. It namely lent itself very well to being used for the purposes of creating tessellations.

Development I and Development II are both prints in which Escher attempts to find a satisfactory way to express the concept of ‘infinity’. They show development, but are also part of a development. In October 1937, he showed his collection of tessellations to his brother Beer (Berend), a professor of geology, mineralogy, palaeontology and crystallography at Leiden University. 

Although Escher was fascinated by the regular division of the plane all his life, he always used his research into this phenomenon as a tool. He never created a tessellation as a stand-alone print, the drawings served as the starting point for other works. An early example of this is Development II. 

Even though Escher produced more than 650 prints of Day and Night, Sky and Water I is undoubtedly his most famous work and the one that is most widely known to the general public. This square woodcut - depicting fish transforming into birds - can be seen on posters, mug, bedspreads and sometimes even in advertising campaigns. 

In December 1938 Escher received a government commission to create ten woodcuts of the city of Delft, for a book publication. In return, Escher would receive the not insubstantial sum of 800 guilders (about €7,500 now). The commission was inspired by a series he created in 1934, called Nocturnal Rome. In the end, the book was never published, but he did produce the woodcuts. Since this series is the only one he made about a Dutch city, the outcome is rather special.

In October 1939, while Europe stood on the brink of World War II, Escher started working on his big Metamorphosis II. He worked on it continuously for nearly six months. During these months he wrote several letters to his friend Hein ’s-Gravezande that make manifest his obsession with this woodcut. He also extemporised on the possible meaning of the colours, the fish, the bees, the birds and the tower.

The woodcut Fish is the first work Escher created in his new home town of Baarn. It's a print consisting of two interwoven threads, which are mirror images of one another. Each of them has a series of fish swimming head to tail. One thread starts in the bottom right corner, zigzags in horizontal swings upwards and finishes in the top left corner. The other one starts bottom left and zigzags towards the upper right corner.

Despite the atrocities of war, some kind of optimism took hold of Escher at the end of February 1943. It was fuelled by nature. On 20 February he wrote in his diary: ‘two butterflies and lots of snowdrops around farmers gardens’. On the 22 February he jotted down: ‘first song of the blackbird’. On 3 March 1943 he even started working on a new print. For this lithograph, Reptiles, he did have to borrow a stone. That is why only 30 copies were printed.

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. 

Escher’s work is teeming with animals, especially in his many tessellations. He interconnected birds, fish, lizards, horses, dogs, butterflies and all kinds of insects in countless ways. But today we will not be concentrating on a tessellation but rather on an individual animal. A creature that rivals Escher in terms of diligence
 

During the war years, the volume of new prints Escher produced fell sharply. He lacked inspiration and he had other things to worry about. But that does not mean he was not engaged in any creative work. During the war, he threw himself into his regular division drawings, constantly devising new variants for filling the plane with regular patterns. Between the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and the Dutch liberation in May 1945, he produced about 35 new drawings..

During the war, Escher had other things to worry about but, after the liberation in May 1945, he released the brakes on his productivity and creativity, even though the start was a difficult one. He had to get used to freedom and initially limited himself to reprinting old prints and selling them. The first creative result was the lithograph Balcony.

One of the most wondrous prints by M.C. Escher is (Two) Doric Columns, a wood engraving in three colours that he created in August 1945, just after the liberation. After Balcony, it was the second new print that Escher produced following the euphoric days in May that year.

Three Spheres I is one of the prints Escher created shortly after the liberation in May 1945. In it, he demonstrated with great precision how to evoke a three-dimensional form on a flat surface.

The euphoria following the liberation in May 1945 was immense, and Maurits Escher was no exception. In a short space of time, he produced a series of prints, including Balcony, Doric Columns and Three Spheres I, followed in January 1946 by the most enigmatic of the series: Magic Mirror.

In August 1946 Escher created a mezzotint of a mummified frog. The choice of both subject and composition are atypical for this period, in which he experiments with tessellations and geometrical shapes. He depicts the skeleton exactly as he sees it. Escher found the frog behind a piece of furniture in his own house. 

Between 1946 and 1951, Escher experimented with the mezzotint technique on several occasions. He was fascinated by the wide range of shades from light to dark that could be achieved with this technique. The most striking print in the series is Eye.

At the end of 1947, Escher produced a preliminary study and a print which typify how he sees the world: as an everlasting struggle between order and chaos. In his view, this was an observation of fact rather than a message or tribute to that world. He was fascinated by the regularity and inevitability of tight geometrical spatial figures, symbols of order in a chaotic world.
 

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant publishes a gradually expanding series on postwar pop culture in the Netherlands. The paper describes the history in 100 objects, focussing on utensils, decorative items, sports equipment, clothing and art objects too. Art journalist Mark Moorman wrote a piece on the wooden sphere featuring lizards that Escher had carved from beech wood in 1949. We have translated it for our readers from abroad.

Between 1948 and 1954 Escher created a series of planetoids and stars. These celestial bodies all appear to be set in the same science fiction world, a world that at first glance seems alien to the earthly, austere artist. The series began with the wood engraving Stars, followed by Double Planetoid and Tetrahedral Planetoid. 
 

There is probably no artist who pictured themselves as often as Rembrandt van Rijn did. About 40 of his self-portraits are known. But Escher too was no stranger to self-portraits. Between 1917 and 1950 he produced 12 of them, several while being reflected in a spherical mirror. 

M.C. Escher experimented in various prints with transforming and converging shapes. In these prints, objects and animals change from one recognisable form to another (transform) or they merge into an end form or end point (converge). He often managed to combine these two principles in a single print, for example in the wood engraving Butterflies.

On 25 November 1950, L.C. Kalff MSc (Eng), Director of Artistic Affairs, dictated the following letter:
"Dear Escher,
Thirty-three years ago, we produced countless drawings together for the Delftsche Studenten Almanak. Although I have not had the pleasure of working with you since those early days, I have been following your Metamorphosis from aspiring architect to graphic artist with great interest. I now have a proposal to make, which I hope will be of interest to you.
We are in great haste to create a reception area in the old factory of 1891, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Philips in May 1951."

The universe of M.C. Escher is governed by harmony, tranquillity, order and peace. Disharmony, unrest, disorder and war are far away. Or serve as a background for the beauty in the foreground. Escher sees the world as an everlasting struggle between these extremes. As an artist he had the task of showing the world that order is self-evident, although it sometimes seems remote.

In March 1951 Escher produced a print with the deceptively simple name Plane Filling I. I say 'deceptively simple' because at that point in time he had been a graphic artist for 30 years and had already produced countless tessellations. Why, then, did he suddenly produce a work that seems to suggest it is the first time he is tackling such a subject?

For a moment you think ‘is it a strange kind of caterpillar, a reptile, what's it actually supposed to be?’ The creature with the marvellous name, De Pedalternorotandomovens centroeulatus articulosus, came into existence, as Escher wrote in his lithograph, ‘due to dissatisfaction with the absence in nature of wheel-shaped, living creatures with the ability to roll themselves forward’.

Fish and birds are Escher’s favorite animals. Or, at least, that is what his work seems to suggest. When he was experimenting with tessellations in the late 1930s, he arrived at these shapes quite soon. They lend themselves very well to the juggling act that is needed for this technique. In Two Intersecting Planes he also made them three-dimensional.

In the years after the war Escher used to take walks after supper in the woods surrounding his house in Baarn. He spent many hours there, to clear his head but also to fill it with new ideas for graphic work. One of these walks would develop into the woodcut Puddle.

In June 1952 Escher created the lithograph Gravity, which, due to its subject, fits perfectly in the series of planetoids and stars that he depicted between 1948 and 1954. His celestial bodies all appear to be set in the same science fiction world, which somehow seems an unlikely place for Escher to feel at home in. The planetoid featured in Gravity is a small stellated dodecahedron.

Studying concepts like eternity and infinity in his work was definitely an obsession for Escher. He explored countless ways of suggesting boundlessness within the limited frame of his woodblock or his lithography stone. One of these was the lithograph Cubic Space Division. It presents three systems of parallel beams intersecting at right angles, dividing each other into pieces of equal length.

Like an intriguing jewel on a jet-black background, the shells from this wood engraving illuminate the immense dark space behind it. Concentric Rinds is one of Escher’s most ingenious works as well as one of his most mysterious.
 

For many years, art critics did not exactly treat Escher favourably. Yet he himself was always his own harshest critic. There are certainly exceptions, but he was often dissatisfied with his latest creation. This varied from ‘this is not quite good enough’ and ‘there should be more to it than this’ to ‘this really is a total failure’. His dissatisfaction spilled over again at the end of October 1955.

Many people regard Escher as the master of illusions. A wizard on paper who tricks you with his impossible constructions and wondrous metamorphoses. Escher was indeed fascinated by the illusions that the flat surface could evoke, but sometimes he just wanted to show the beauty in reality. Three Worlds is one of the finest examples of this.

For commercial assignments, Escher almost always chose subjects and designs that he had tried before. Commissions were necessary evils and rarely inspired him. Not that this was a real problem. Clients chose Escher because they were familiar with his work and were keen to see certain aspects of it feature in the end product. The commission that Escher received in the summer of 1956 was a little different. 

Smaller and Smaller is the most detailed of all Escher's prints. The ultimate expression of his abilities. In his own words: "The area of each of the reptile-shaped elements of this pattern is regularly and continuously halved towards the centre, where theoretically both infinite smallness in size and infinite greatness in number are reached."

Convex and Concave is a narrative print brimming with elements that can be interpreted in two ways. About two years later he created a lithograph on the same subject, albeit with an image that is a lot more concise. In it he combines a cube that allows for just one interpretation with some objects that can be convex or concave and that can be positioned in front or behind.

For the wood engraving and woodcut Whirlpools, Escher employed a new printing technique; he carved a single block, which he used to print in two colours on the same sheet of paper. Two rows of fish swimming head to tail fill the space. The red row has exactly the same shape as the grey one, but has been turned 180 degrees.

M.C. Escher created illustrations for texts by other people in 1921, 1931 and 1932. But after Flor de Pascua, XXIV Emblemata and De vreeselijke avonturen van Scholastica (The Terrible Adventures of Scholastica) respectively, he was done with it. He no longer wanted to be associated with the book illustration profession. When the bibliophilic De Roos Foundation asks him in 1956 to illustrate a story by Belcampo, he refuses on principle.

Contacts had been established earlier that year, but in December 1957 it was officially ratified: by order of Utrecht City Council, Escher was allowed to make a mural for the auditorium of the reception building of Tolsteeg cemetery. 

To many, Escher’s impossible buildings are the highlights of his oeuvre. These are the prints that visitors look for when they come to our museum. They stand in front of them and discuss with their family and friends what they see happening before their eyes. In that respect they really are conversation pieces.

In October 1958, Escher created one of his most beautiful, but also most complex objects. He did extensive research for Sphere Spirals, searching for a solution to show the open ribbons that form this sphere in a three-dimensional form.

M.C. Escher is world-famous for his optical illusions, but it is less well-known that he also made public artworks. In the winter of 1959-60, he designed a tile tableau with fish and birds, inspired by his famous print Sky and Water I (1938), for a villa at Dirk Schäferstraat 59 in the south of Amsterdam.

In December 1958 and January 1959, Escher worked on a new print that he intended to display at an exhibition in Museum Boymans in February. Adopting the group name Vier Grafici (‘Four Graphic Artists’), he was exhibiting with Harry van Kruiningen, Wout van Heusden and Harry Disberg. A company he had been in before. 

Escher was first and foremost a printmaker. That said, he also produced a variety of designs for art in public spaces. For example, he designed some magnificent tiled columns with regular tessellations for two schools. For the Maris College in The Hague in 1959 (back then still called the Johanna Westermanschool and situated on J.W. Frisolaan) and Baarnsch Lyceum in Baarn a decade later.

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.   

Ascending and Descending was the result of a remarkable exchange of ideas between the graphic artist and the British mathematician Roger Penrose. The latter first came into contact with M.C. Escher at his solo exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1954, which was held during the International Congress of Mathematicians of that year. Escher’s work impressed Penrose greatly and soon after, he began creating impossible images of his own.

In July 1960 Escher completed the last of his four ‘circle limits’. He had struggled with it for a while, but it was a publication by the Canadian professor H.S.M. Coxeter that set him on the right path. In the article, Coxeter described how a tessellation from the centre to the edge of a circle is increasingly reduced and the motifs come to lie infinitely close together.

‘The fascinating OMG moment.’ This is how, in an edition of VPRO radio show OVT, former curator Micky Piller describes the moment in which a viewer takes a second look at Escher’s lithograph Waterfall. The viewer experiences the OMG moment, when the brain cannot make sense of what the eyes are telling it.

Besides selling his prints, Escher made a living from undertaking commissions. He often applied tessellations when working on them. The confectionery tin designed by Escher in 1962/3 is no exception. This unique piece was commissioned by Verblifa (Vereenigde Blik Fabrikanten, United Tin Can Producers), to mark the company's 75th anniversary. Each tin was filled with bonbons for employees, clients and business associates.

It was a fact of life for Escher that his health deteriorated during the late 1960s. He struggled with it his entire life, but this particular decade was a succession of good and bad spells. During the good spells, he was alert and active; during the bad ones, poor health dominated his life.