A Special Pet: The White Cat

As a curator at Escher in The Palace, I’m always looking for work by M.C. Escher to add to the collection. A small number of prints by Escher that we do not have in our collection have been on our wishlist for years. They are rare, however, and difficult to come by. Near the top of the list was Escher’s woodcut White Cat (1919), a tender image that Escher made of his pet while he was studying in Haarlem.

When, last December, we received the opportunity to acquire this piece, we did not hesitate for a moment. And it really seemed that fortune had smiled on us as, when we removed the print from its frame we found, to our great surprise, an unknown (but incomplete) text by Escher under the mount. It took some puzzling out, but we have now managed to reconstruct the majority of the text, which gives us a glimpse into the mind of the young artist, who was experimenting with the possibilities afforded by graphic techniques.

A furry friend

The white cat in the print symbolises Escher’s time as a young man in Haarlem. In 1919 Escher went to study at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He moved to Haarlem, and took board and lodging at number 11 Zijlstraat. He shared his modest accommodation – consisting of a sitting room and a bedroom – with a white cat that was given to him by his landlady.

The cat became a favourite subject for Escher. He filled a sketchbook with drawings of his pet, and included her in three woodcuts. Twice, the cat was the main subject, while in the third she lies on the sitter’s lap. Escher’s fondness for his pet cat is apparent from the woodcut showing a frontal view of her with her eyes closed. From close up, it becomes clear how painstakingly he cut the fine hairs of the cat’s fur into the wooden block.

We know from his father’s diary that Escher was proud of the print. He took a copy to show his parents in Oosterbeek, and his friend and fellow student Henk Calkoen was also charmed by it. He wrote an article praising Escher’s woodcut for Eigen Haard magazine:

In the creative process, his artist’s intuition forged the harmony between form and content. […] The harmonious distribution of the white and black makes this woodcut fascinating from the very first glance. See the delicate curve in the strong but elegant line of the back; how beautifully the character of the diffident cat is presented, concentrated into a single, almost uninterrupted patch of white, itself so beautifully enclosed by the square. And at the same time we feel the artist coming to us through this artwork.

Counterproof

This version of White Cat is a counterproof, which makes it unique. A counterproof is a print of a print, so it is not a mirror-image of the picture on the wooden block or lithography stone. The technique allowed Escher to print the cat as he saw her. Several direct prints (not counterproofs, therefore) of White Cat are known to exist, in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. A 1920 issue of Eigen Haard also has a direct print of the cat. Here, you can see that the monogram (the letters MCE which Escher incorporated into his prints) does not appear in mirror-image, as it does in the counterproof.

At the start of his career, especially, Escher often experimented with counterproofs. In 1935 he deliberately made a counterproof of a portrait of his father, explaining:

When portraying someone with highly asymmetrical features in a print, the likeness is largely lost in the proof, which is of course a mirror-image of the original work. I therefore made a ‘counterproof’ in this case, i.e. pressed the first print on paper against another piece of paper while the ink was still wet, cancelling out the mirror effect.

Making a counterproof of White Cat thus brought Escher closer to his own pet, as he later found with the portrait of his father. It is a personal approach that gives us a glimpse of Escher’s reality, and teaches us more about him as an artist and as a person

Discovering the text

Just how interested Escher was in the counterproof technique became clear when we removed the frame from White Cat. When our paper conservator removed the mount, we made an astonishing find: a text about the print written by M.C. Escher himself, hidden underneath. In the text, he explains why he made this particular counterproof. Unfortunately, parts of the text had been cut away or erased. This probably happened decades ago when the work was framed, as the text must have been regarded as less important than the image at the time. Over the past few months, we have been working with colleagues at Escher in The Palace and Kunstmuseum Den Haag to reconstruct the missing parts of the text, and we have now succeeded in making it readable. It has been reproduced at the bottom of the page.

Below the image on the left, Escher wrote ‘Voor Ruut, van Oom Mauk’ (To Ruut, from Uncle Mauk), evidence that he dedicated the counterproof to his nephew. Escher was known as Mauk to his family and close friends, and it was not unusual for him to give a print to a loved one as a gift. Uncle Mauk gave this particular one to Rudolf Escher, son of Berend Escher, M.C. Escher’s half-brother, who was influential in the development of Escher’s printmaking. Later, Rudolf Escher became a well-known composer, but he was still a child at the time of White Cat. This may have been why Escher regarded the print as an ideal gift for his young nephew.

Text on White Cat

The text discovered behind the mount, completed by a team from Escher in The Palace and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, is reproduced below. Most of the text on the paper was still legible, and the English translation is based on the Dutch as transcribed word for word. The words marked in grey had been cut away, so part of each sentence was omitted. The missing parts have been filled in, to make a readable whole. The sentence in yellow had been erased completely, and was no longer legible. We can only guess at what it said.

This M.C.E. is
not mistakenly
reversed. The
print is a counter-
proof, i.e.: a
print of a
print. In the wood
I cut the letters
in mirror writing,
so the print turns
out just right.
When the printing
ink is still wet, it is
however possible
using great
pressure (in the
etching press), to make
another print,
a counterproof, of it.
The counterproof is
thus the mirror-
image of the
print, and is therefore like
the piece of wood.
The advantage of
a counterproof over
a normal print is
that I, e.g. in[..
….] print just as
[I cut?] it. The mirror-image
generally gives a different impression, an
impression I did not intend – the
wrong one. The Pipa is also a counterproof.
The other three are direct prints.

Although this is a fairly factual text about the counterproof procedures, it has brought us a step closer to Escher. It also raises all kinds of questions. What was he thinking at the time? Why did he opt for a counterproof? And at what point in his life did this all happen? It gives us a glimpse of the mind of the young Escher, as he was just embarking on his career as an artist, and still developing his own unique style and technical skills in his formative years.