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Repeating reptiles
15 September 2018

Repeating reptiles

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. In that respect, a lizard (or salamander) interested him as much or as little as birds and fish did. These three animal groups are by far the most common in his work, but they owe that status purely to their form.

M.C. Escher, Regular division drawing no. 101 (Lizards), India ink, pencil, water color, September 1956

M.C. Escher, Regular division drawing no. 101 (Lizards), India ink, pencil, water color, September 1956

In the case of the lizard, this form occurs in a number of main variants:

  1. The one in Development I (with the head turned sideways, showing just one eye)
  2. The one in Development II and Reptiles (the angular version with the eyes on top and the hind legs pointing backwards)
  3. The one in Division and Smaller and smaller (more fluid with round eyes and all legs pointing forward).

M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II, woodcut in black, green and brown, printed from twenty blocks, on three combined sheets, November 1939 - March 1940

M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II, woodcut in black, green and brown, printed from twenty blocks, on three combined sheets, November 1939 - March 1940

Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III both feature variants one and two. In addition, Escher invented a number of lizard variants that can be found in his notebooks with regular divisions of the plane, but he didn't use them in prints.

In July 1956, Escher worked on Division, in September on a drawing in which the same lizards become ever smaller, and in October he translated this drawing into the woodcut Smaller and smaller. In May 1957, he would return to the form again when he produced a variant on the drawing for his book Regular Division of the Plane. All these works feature a variant of the third type of lizard.

Drawing no. 101 from September 1956 is an adaptation of drawing no. 35, from July 1941. In it, the lizards are repeated one by one, in two different colours. In drawing 101 and in Division and Smaller and Smaller, Escher made the lizards shrink by dividing and halving them. In the first works, he chose to split the lizards, interrupting the black line at the points where they overlap. In Smaller and Smaller, he has found a perfect system in which the animals exist and divide independently without overlap.

Regular division drawing no. 14 (Lizards), India ink, pencil and watercolor, November 1937

Regular division drawing no. 14 (Lizards), India ink, pencil and watercolor, November 1937

M.C. Escher, Development I, woodcut, November 1937

M.C. Escher, Development I, woodcut, November 1937

Regular division drawing with lizards, no. 25, India ink, pencil and watercolor, January 1939

Regular division drawing with lizards, no. 25, India ink, pencil and watercolor, January 1939

M.C. Escher, Reptiles, lithography, March 1943

M.C. Escher, Reptiles, lithography, March 1943

Regular division drawing no. 35 (Lizards), India ink, colored pencil, opaque white, July 1941

Regular division drawing no. 35 (Lizards), India ink, colored pencil, opaque white, July 1941

M.C. Escher, Smaller and smaller, wood engraving in and woodcut in black and red, printed from four blocks, October 1956

M.C. Escher, Smaller and smaller, wood engraving in and woodcut in black and red, printed from four blocks, October 1956

M.C. Escher, Division, woodcut, second state, July 1956

M.C. Escher, Division, woodcut, second state, July 1956

Regular division drawing no. 75 (Reptiles), India ink, pencil, black and white poster paint, July 1949

Regular division drawing no. 75 (Reptiles), India ink, pencil, black and white poster paint, July 1949

Regular division drawing no. 56 (Lizards), India ink, gold ink, coloured pencil, poster paint, November 1942

Regular division drawing no. 56 (Lizards), India ink, gold ink, coloured pencil, poster paint, November 1942

Regular division drawing no. 77 (Reptiles), drawn at Les Diablerets, India ink, colored ink, colored pencil, watercolor, August 1949

Regular division drawing no. 77 (Reptiles), drawn at Les Diablerets, India ink, colored ink, colored pencil, watercolor, August 1949

Incidentally, Escher did not give his regular division drawings a title. He sometimes referred to the reptilians as ‘congruent figures of reptilian form’, but didn't go beyond this description. In her book Visions of Symmetry, in which she elaborates on all the drawings from Escher's notebooks, author Doris Schattschneider does go beyond it. She talks about angels, devils, birds, fish, frogs, snakes, shells, insects and lizards. The nomenclature goes against Escher’s somewhat more rigid approach, but it does make it a lot easier to identify and talk about them.

Erik Kersten

Erik Kersten

Editor

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First lithograph and Schaffhausen

First lithograph and Schaffhausen

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 1929 they even stayed for several months, from July to mid October. Escher had already made a trip to the Italian Abruzzo region together with his friend Giuseppe Haas-Triverio in spring. The tour yielded 28 drawings, one of which he developed into a lithograph in Steckborn, his first of an Italian landscape.
A tunnel of butterflies, 1944

A tunnel of butterflies, 1944

During the war years, the volume of new prints Escher produced fell sharply. He lacked inspiration and he had other things . 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 WWII in 1939 and the Dutch liberation in May 1945, he produced about 35 new drawings.
Portrait of father Escher, 1935

Portrait of father Escher, 1935

On 4 July 1935 Escher and his family moved from Rome to the Swiss town Château-d'Oex, after which he traveled almost directly to the Netherlands to arrange things for a long stay in Switzerland. From his parents’ home in The Hague he visited, among other things, his old teacher Jessurun de Mesquita, he consulted with his cousin Anton Escher about a logo for his machine factory, he talks to the Dutch postal service ‘PTT’ and ‘Drukkerij Enschedé’ about his design for the aviation fund stamp and he meets with his friends Jan van der Does the Willebois and Bas Kist. Between all visits he spends three weeks working on a very detailed, loving portrait of his father.