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.

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.

2024 marks the centenary of the death of Julie de Graag. This talented contemporary of M.C. Escher managed in her woodcuts to capture the essence of plants, animals and people with just a few details. The two artists shared a great love of nature, closely observing the world around them, and depicting it in their prints, each in their own unique way.

Escher’s Belvedere (1958) is a favourite with our visitors. The print has a magical power that touches millions of Escher fans around the world. It is a mix of completely different elements. Not only the foreground of the print has been a mystery, the landscape in the background was too.

A special donation was recently made around a tile tableau by Escher with fish and birds for the Dirk Schäferstraat 59 in Amsterdam. The donation includes two never-before-seen drawings by M.C. Escher, an extensive correspondence between the people involved and family photos of the unveiling of the tile tableau.

Since the Just like Escher exhibition, the striking modular carpet from Studio Wae has been on display on the second floor. This floor covering lends a contemporary touch to Escher's legacy, above all doing so in a sustainable, circular way through the use of waste materials.

It was not just collectors and fans of M.C. Escher who acquired his work during his lifetime. Friends and family also owned prints by Escher, like this lithograph, Drawing Hands, from the estate of Antoinette Schottelius-De Ridder, better known as Tony de Ridder. Escher in The Palace recently received this work on long-term loan, and correspondence between Escher and De Ridder has, to our great delight, been donated to the museum.

Curator Judith Kadee and paper conservator Paul van der Zande did not know what they were in for, when they unframed the newly acquired White Cat by M.C. Escher. Are you curious about the story behind this extraordinary discovery? Read the Escher Today here.

The five Wadden Islands in the north of the Netherlands provide a home for locals but are also a popular holiday destination. Although part of the Netherlands, the islands feel like a foreign country, if only because of the ferry trip you have to make to reach them. Mainlanders flock to the area for the sea air or to soak up the island atmosphere. This attraction is not new: the area was already popular with holidaymakers when M.C. Escher was a boy.

Last summer, Escher in The Palace received a special donation from Escher expert and mathematician Doris Schattschneider. She donated a Koh-I-Noor tin by Verkade, inspired by the Koh-I-Noor, one of the world's most famous diamonds.

Every year is special at Escher in The Palace, but 2023 was truly one for the books. This year marked 125 years since M.C. Escher was born and that fact was celebrated far and wide. These days, we especially look back on all the wonderful exhibitions and events we had the pleasure of organising. The Escher jubilee year was celebrated with wonderful exhibitions at our museum and also at Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Fortunately, the final exhibition Just Like Escher can still be seen until the 24th of March 2024. The anniversary year was also celebrated with numerous activities in The Hague. In addition, we continued to post as many stories about Escher's life and art as possible. All the wonderful 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 2024 with our stories and images!

Inspiration can be taken not only from a direct mentor (who is essential for each and every art student) but also from masters from past eras. Escher, for instance, learned not only from his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita but also from looking to the past. In turn, De Mesquita drew on work by an old master too. Looking to precedents produced by artists from before one’s time is extremely common. Working in the style of or imitating well-known pictures is one way for artists to draw on the techniques and ideas of their heroes and to challenge themselves by looking at art from another person’s perspective

Flat surfaces were tremendously important to M.C. Escher. A two-dimensional blank sheet of paper gave him the opportunity to explore the infinite and to conjure illusions. On such sheets he would create deceptive three-dimensional worlds in which order and chaos are in conflict, just like in the real world. But despite order frequently losing out to chaos in the real world, Escher turned this on its head.

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 did not, or simply could not, co-exist and bringing them together in a single image. The extreme perspectives on display in Still Life with Spherical Mirror – in which Escher depicts a reflection of himself and his environment – marked the artist’s first foray into this style. The pieces Still Life with Mirror and Still Life and Street are two other early examples of Escher’s merging worlds. Later, this desire to reflect impossible realities would lead to prints such as Other World, Double Planetoid, Gravity, Relativity, Print Gallery, Belvedere and Waterfall. Escher took an intriguing detour from this path with Dream (Mantis Religiosa), which depicts an impossible scene that is explicitly labelled by Escher himself as a dream.

A remarkable self-portrait by Rembrandt will be on display at our museum from 29 November until 29 January. It is a self-portrait with a stormy history, disappearing off the radar for many years and now returning to the place where it hung for a long time in the nineteenth century. This painting can be seen in the royal ballroom of the palace, amid M.C. Escher's prints. Despite the obvious link between this self-portrait by Rembrandt and Lange Voorhout Palace, there also appear to be undeniable connections between Rembrandt and Escher.

2022 has come to an end and it has been another special and unforgettable year. These days, we look back on all the wonderful things we have been able to organise this year. No fewer than four temporary exhibitions have been held in the museum, in addition to the permanent presentation of Escher's art!
We also aimed to share as many stories as possible about Escher's life and art with you through our social media channels, our website and the in-depth articles we wrote. All of the wonderful images that we have shared this year can be found in this special end-of-year animation. We thank everyone for their attention and support over the past year and hope to inspire you again in the Escher anniversary year 2023 with our stories and images!

In October 1952, M.C. Escher created a series of woodcuts on the subject of the four elements. It was a commissioned work for collector and graphic art fanatic Eugène Strens and his wife Willy. Eugène Strens (1899 - 1980) was trained as an engineer, but his great passion was graphic art.

In general, mirrors reflect reality, but in the world of art, different laws apply. Certainly in the world of Maurits Cornelis Escher. Here, nothing is what it seems. His prints are instantly recognisable, but the man behind them was something of an enigma. He looks at you in mirror prints such as Hand with Reflecting Sphere or Three Spheres II. Confident, empathic. But also composed and perhaps even a little mocking.

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. For if you can no longer talk to each other, how can you continue to build together at such a height?

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. In the spring of 1969 he had a good spell again and he filled his time with a number of lectures, produced 40 prints of Day and Night (although he thought that this was a waste of his precious time) and devised and created a new print.
It was working on something new that made him especially happy. In a letter to his son George, he wrote that he was 'wild with excitement' about Snakes. In the winter of 1967/1968, he had extended his Metamorphosis II to Metamorphosis III, but the last new print preceding it originated from autumn 1966. He therefore devoted himself wholeheartedly to this new stream of creativity, despite being afflicted by poor health. The development process took a great deal of energy, and he often had to stop work in order to take a break.

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. He wrote about the print in a letter to his son George and his wife Corrie:

"After a week of endless dispiration, I again find myself exploring tetrahedral and octahedral space: caves and caverns, wondrous pillars, abysses and vistas, all rigorously four-sided and eight-sided. My plan now is to finally have the cross-eyed flatworm I love swim in it."

2021 has come to an end and it has been another special and unforgettable year. We look back on all the wonderful things we have been able to organise this year. No fewer than four temporary exhibitions have been held in the museum, in addition to the permanent presentation of Escher's art!
All of the wonderful images about our exhibitions, activities and the in-depth articles on our website can be seen in this special end-of-year animation. We thank everyone for their attention and support over the past year and hope to inspire you again in 2022 with our stories and artworks!

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, to the Abruzzi, Sicily, Calabria or the Amalfi Coast. In the first few years, places around his home town of Rome or in the nearby province of Viterbo were added. He also travelled to Corsica and Spain. In the autumn and winter following these trips, he fleshed out his sketches and photos into prints. But in May 1926, things were different.

On 2 July 1965, journalist, poet, critic and essayist G.H. 's-Gravesande, known by his nickname Hein, died. Although Escher and Hein had been friends for over 30 years, the artist did not attend the cremation. He was engrossed in working on the print Knots, a subject in which he had become completely absorbed. This would hardly have surprised 's-Gravesande. He published several articles and a booklet on the man whom he also greatly admired as an artist. Hein 's-Gravesande was one of the first critics to pay serious attention to the work of M.C. Escher, and the graphic artist owes much to him.

M.C. Escher is undoubtedly the most famous graphic artist in the Netherlands. But he was certainly not the only one, as evidenced by our exhibition Graphic Grandeur: Escher and his Contemporaries. Escher was in contact with fellow graphic artists and in a number of cases this also led to joint exhibitions. He was trained as a graphic artist and was indeed an artist, but he struggled with that label all his life. He situated himself more in the tradition of artist-as-craftsman. To be able to make graphic art, it was first and foremost important to have a solid mastery of the necessary techniques. That was true for Escher himself as well as for colleagues. He always appreciated meeting graphic artists who were also masters of their craft. He liked to surround himself with these craftsmen.

The final print in Graphic Grandeur: Escher and his Contemporaries is an ode not to Escher, but to the first royal resident of this palace: Queen Emma, the Queen Mother. In this 1897 lithograph by Jan Toorop (1858-1928) we see Emma and her daughter Wilhelmina on a visit to Gouda. The print features all kinds of objects associated with industry in Gouda at the time, such as pipes and candles. The litho is made in Toorop’s distinctive Art Nouveau style, recognisable by its strong contours with graceful lines and exuberant decorative elements. This style was also popularly called the Salad Oil Style, in response to the iconic decorative poster that Toorop made for the Nederlandsche Oliefabriek (Dutch Oil Factory) in Delft.

The history of printmaking goes back for centuries. So it is no wonder that a great range of printmaking techniques have been developed over time. From woodcut to copper engraving and from mezzotint to screen printing. Moreover, many graphic artists have successfully added their own personal twist to this ancient craft. By experimenting they paved the way for technological improvements, but also for new modes of artistic expression. Experiments formed part of printmaking from the very beginning. In the 17th century, for example, the Dutch artist Hercules Seghers inked his etchings with oil paint, bringing color to the black-and-white world of etching.

Memento mori: this old Latin phrase reminds people that we will all die some day. This saying is the gloomy subject of the simple yet direct woodcut of Julie de Graag (1877-1924). De Graag was a talented graphic artist and her work was highly stylised. Influenced by sculptor Joseph Mendes da Costa and De Stijl’s Bart van der Leck, she increasingly omitted details, as her linework grew simpler and more direct.

The term homo universalis, meaning universal man, aka polymath, was coined in the Renaissance by the writer, philosopher and musician Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). Leonardo da Vinci is often seen as the quintessential polymath. In his case, this referred to his mastery of the complete spectrum of sciences. Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-332 BC) is considered to be the first homo universalis. The term is at times applied incorrectly, but Richard Roland Holst (1868-1938) definitely qualifies. In the database of the RKD, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, he is described as an author, sculptor, scene-painter, Academy director, etcher, glass painter, professor, illustrator, lithographer, furniture designer, designer, painter, draftsman, maker of woodcuts and muralist. A universal man of the arts, in other words.

The tradition of portraiture goes back centuries. An entire room is devoted to this subject in the exhibition Graphic Grandeur: Escher and his Contemporaries. You are not the only one looking here in this gallery. Lots of eyes are looking back at you, too: from Beethoven to a stylised dog, and from Escher’s wife Jetta to a Dutch General with one eye. As soon as the exhibition opens to the public (hopefully as soon as possible!), you can look and be seen here.

Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita was a gifted artist, painter and printmaker with an idiosyncratic signature who occupies a special place in the canon of art. But above all he is the discoverer of M.C. Escher, the man who made the architecture student choose the profession that would make him world-famous. The sorcerer's apprentice was to outshine his discoverer and things slowly grew quieter around De Mesquita. On 31 January 1944 he was arrested by the Nazis. He died shortly afterwards in Auschwitz concentration camp. Escher was devastated and the death of his teacher made a deep impression on him. Nowadays the name of Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita is often directly linked to that of Escher, but there is still plenty to say about the teacher.

With Belvedere, Waterfall and Ascending and Descending, M.C. Escher created three iconic prints based on impossible figures: a cube, a triangle and a staircase. He invented the one for Belvedere himself, but the impossible triangle and the infinite staircase were presented to him by the British mathematicians Lionel and Roger Penrose. These figures were just thought experiments for Penrose Senior and Penrose Junior. But there was someone who had been obsessed with them all his life: Oscar Reutersvärd. This Swedish artist and art historian, who can be regarded as the archetypal father of the impossible figure, passed away on 2 February 2002.

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. The mottoes and poems were written by art historian G.J. Hoogewerff, director of the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome and a friend to Escher. One of those prints is Retreat. It features a birdhouse, hanging from a tree.

2020 has passed. A year no one will ever forget. But even in this crazy year, we brought you many stories about the life and work of M.C. Escher. All the images we used are collected in this video.
We thank everyone for your attention this year and onwards to a hopeful 2021!

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. In the autumn, he was approached by the municipal council to make a design. The reception building had very recently been renovated and the municipal authorities thought there was room for some aesthetic improvement too. The advisory committee for Visual Arts and Applied Sciences decided to delegate the task to the graphic artist M.C. Escher. He welcomed the assignment and set straight to work.

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. During his travels, he took numerous photos which he pasted into a photo album, adding a note about them in his diary. They are memories of a beautiful journey, but in many of those photos, you can also recognise the landscapes that would go on to feature in his work. In the spring of 1930, Escher made a journey through the region of Calabria that proved very fertile. The tour took in such as Palizzi, Morano, Pentedatillo, Stilo, Scilla, Tropea, Santa Severina, Rocca Imperiale, and Rossano and yielded no less than 13 prints.

9 November 1778 saw the death of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Italian artist and architect regarded as the greatest graphic artist of his time. His fame was primarily due to his Vedute di Roma, a series of etchings with impressive views of the ruins and monuments of Rome. But above all it is Piranesi's famous fantasy prints about prisons, the Carceri d'Invenzione, that continue to appeal to the imagination so much to this day. Escher was a great admirer. When he moved to the Swiss town of Château-d'Oex in 1935, he hung a number of prints by Piranesi in his studio. As if he wanted to keep the memory of his old home town alive. The main thing these two artists have in common is their staggering imagination.

The exhibition ‘Glorious Glass: Optical glass art from the Czech Republic and Slovakia’ was supposed to be on display at Escher in The Palace until 8 November. Unfortunately, events have overtaken us. Due to the developments surrounding Covid-19, the museum will be closing for at least two weeks from 5 November. Thus putting an abrupt end to the Glorious Glass exhibition. For those keen to reminisce about the exhibition or for those who missed out, our curator Judith Kadee has written an interesting article about the unique collection of optical glass featured in the exhibition.

Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt was born on 23 October 1915. He was a man with many hobbies, though his greatest love was the work of M.C. Escher. From the moment he set eyes on some Escher prints in 1954 he was captivated and would go on to become an obsessive collector of everything that had anything to do with the graphic artist: prints, reproductions, letters, books, newspaper articles, and all kinds of Escher products. But the two also became personal friends, and Roosevelt became a confidant that Escher would often rely on.

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 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. In his letter to the secretary of the De Roos Foundation, C.J. (Karel) Asselbergs, he says that he is not an illustrator by nature and that he considered illustrating a pure waste of time. He sees it as his duty to visualise his own personal thoughts. He proposes to make a book for De Roos himself, containing ‘word illustrations’ for his own prints.

Up early this morning to join the three Germans, the Stern family, on a trip to Giarre by train to see the same lava flow (from 1928) that I already saw and drew three years ago. There, I find a particularly typical subject: a house with a beautiful palm behind it, spared from the heavy lava destruction and completely surrounded by black lava.

Escher wrote this in his travel diary on 4 May 1936, detailing his voyage on and around the Mediterranean. The house — the subject of a drawing and (in August) of a lithograph — had (almost) fallen prey to a powerful opponent: Mount Etna.

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.

On July 29, 1961, the article How to read a painting (Adventures of the mind) by art historian Ernst Gombrich appears in the famous American magazine The Saturday Evening Post. Gombrich describes a number of Escher's prints in detail. The sub-heading reads: "By visual paradoxes the artist shocks the viewer into the realization that there is more to art than meets the eye." A phrase that can clearly be related to Escher. The article generated a lot of extra interest in Escher's work.

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. They visited places like Vietri, Puntone, Scala, Positano, Praiano and of course Ravello. Here stood the Albergo dell Toro, the hotel where Maurits and Jetta first set eyes on one another. The town has special significance for them and is given prominence in Escher’s work too. He was particularly affected by the Moorish motifs he found in the town, including the ones in the Duomo. He did several drawings and took several photos in Ravello and the town can also be seen in a series of prints that he produced in the early 1930s. One is San Giovanni, Ravello (in Campidoglio), Ravello. A wood engraving from February 1932.

M.C. Escher experimented in various prints with transforming and converging shapes. Early examples of this are Development I (1937) and Development II (1939), Day and Night (1938), Sky and Water I (1938) and II (1938), Verbum (1942) and Metamorphosis I and II (1937 and 1939-1940). 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 from June 1950.

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. If you take ‘impossible’ in a broad sense, Up and Down, House of Stairs, Relativity, Convex and Concave, Print Gallery, Belvedere, Ascending and Descending and Waterfall can be defined as impossible buildings. But it is the last three of these that Escher himself referred to as such and which are also the ones most open to interpretation. ‘Look, see that? That’s impossible, right?’

‘I used to love Grimms’ fairy tales a lot. As a child, even as a boy, I was very moved by them. Now I’m rereading The Hobbit, by Tolkien, the journey of those dwarfs. It’s so far removed from reality. Why (gaze stripped of all playfulness) do we have to endure this miserable reality all the time? Why can’t we just play?’
Escher said this in the long interview with journalist Bibeb, printed in weekly magazine Vrij Nederland on 20 April 1968. He was known to many as a serious and straightforward artist, but this quote once again makes things less clear-cut.

French philosopher, journalist, writer and Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote his novel The Plague in 1947. The book was a direct response to the horrors of World War II. The disease itself and its defeat are a metaphor for the fight against the Nazis, the brown plague. In the current corona crisis, war is a distant concept for most of the affected countries, but other than that the parallels between the book and the bizarre reality of 2020 are striking. Escher attentively read The Plague and other works by Camus. And it is back in the spotlight now.