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.
In October 1925 the young couple Maurits and Jetta can finally start setting up their first home. It’s the top floor of a house that is still under construction, in a new neighborhood on the slopes of the Monteverde. The house on Via Alessandro Poerio 100 was beautifully situated with a view of the Tiber valley, in the southeastern part of the city. On the other side of the river was the Monte Palatino, with the Roman quarter Trastevere below. The couple had already bought the house at the end of 1924, but first they had to wait until it was finished, after which it turned out to be too humid. They let it dry all summer and spent those months at the Albergo del Toro in Ravello; the place where they had met.
On September 23, 1957, Escher returned to Amsterdam from a sea voyage with the freighter s.s. Luna. By then, Escher had long been addicted to traveling on cargo ships and he seized every opportunity to book such a trip. In August and September 1957 he bobbed for seven weeks on the Mediterranean Sea while enjoying the waves, the peace, the light and the silence. Back in the Netherlands, he mused on for a while.
Lizards had fascinated him for quite some time, but in the summer and fall of 1956 Escher was particularly busy with them. This fascination came not so much from the behavior or way of life of the creatures, but from the characteristic form. It lent itself very well for making 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.
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.
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.
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.
On 19 August 1960, Escher held a lecture at the Fifth Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography. He was invited to this congress by Prof. Dr Carolina H. MacGillavry, professor in chemical crystallography at the University of Amsterdam. In 1950 she was appointed as the first female member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. MacGillavry was a great admirer of Escher and would go on to publish the book Symmetry Aspects of M.C. Escher’s Periodic Drawings in 1965. For crystallographers, the tessellations on which Escher spent years working in his sketchbooks were ideal teaching materials. His patterns are very well suited to being used to study the symmetry, repetition and reflection that are so characteristic of the field. Below is one of the drawings from Escher’s sketchbooks that was exhibited in Cambridge and is included in the book by MacGillavry.
In March 1965, Escher met the French artist and professor Albert Flocon, lecturer at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Flocon mainly created copper engravings and, like Escher, he was fascinated by the mystery of the perspective. Especially the curvilinear perspective, a form that Escher has also used several times (think of Hand with reflecting sphere, Balcony, Three Spheres II, Drop (Dewdrop) and Self Portrait in Spherical Mirror).
The meeting proved to be of great importance to Escher; Flocon ensured that his prints became known in Paris. The professor personally mediated on the sale of prints and an organized Escher exhibition in Paris. In October 1965 Flocon published a ten-page article about Escher in the important monthly Jardin des Arts.
Today is International Cat Day, a great time to show the cats Escher captured in one of his prints. There are not that many. He often used animals in his work, but his tessellations and metamorphoses mostly feature birds, fish and reptiles. The cats are mainly from his younger years. This is one of those early ones, from when he was 21 years old, around the time he decided to become a graphic artist. On 17 September 1919 he moved to Haarlem. He gets a white cat from his landlady, which would inspire him to produce several woodcuts. On this one the cat lies on the lap of a man who visited Escher in Haarlem. We do not know who it is. Probably one of his childhood friends, Bas Kist or Jan van der Does de Willebois, or his older brother Nol.
See also International Cat Day 2017, featuring a cat on Corsica.
Summer is in full swing. Not the time to be working hard. That is something for autumn, winter and early spring. At least, that was the timetable to which Escher largely adhered throughout his working life. If you look at the months he worked (these are known from 1922 onwards), they usually span September to May. It is a logical consequence of his approach; in spring and summer he went out to get inspiration, to take photos and to draw. In autumn and in winter he developed these preliminary studies into woodcuts, wood engravings and lithographs.
Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions to this rule. 43 exceptions to be precise.