Escher Today

Today is Eschers Birthday! On 17 June 1898 at 7.15 Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in the substantial parental house in Leeuwarden, in what is now The Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics. Not that he was fond of birthdays himself. He used to say life was too short to create everything he wanted. His birthday only reminded him of the passage of time.

On 16 June 1924 Maurits marries Jetta Umiker in the Italian coastal town Viareggio. The eldest daughter of the Swiss businessman Arturo Umiker and the Italian Enrichetta Cataneo, she was a silent girl whom he had met in Ravello 15 months earlier. Maurits was fascinated by this melancholic, sickly girl. He believed she was unhappy and the infatuated young man hoped to make her happy. Though not necessarily through marriage, as he was afraid of losing his artistic freedom and wanted more time to get to know Jetta.

George Arnold Escher was 96 years old when he passed away on 14 June 1939. It was therefore no surprise to his son Maurits that his death was near. Yet it felt like a shock. Maurits was the last of father Escher’s five sons (two of whom were from his first marriage).

In May 1933, Escher made a trip across Corsica with his friends Giuseppe Haas-Triverio and Roberto Schiess. Corsica was quite rugged and desolate in those days, inhabited by just 150,000 people. Within five weeks, they crossed the island on foot, by carriage, and by bus. The medieval town of Nonza was the subject of a lithograph Escher made the following winter.

On 6 June 1935 Escher’s father received a letter from his son informing him that a rich architect had bought ten of his prints for 900 lire.* This sum was nearly enough to cover his trip to Sicily he was on at the time. It was a high point of what was to be a year of financial disaster for Escher.

On 31 May 1919 M.C. Escher was determined unfit for military service. As a result, his plan to finish his secondary school exams, which he had failed the year before, could not be executed. While in service he would start his engineering studies in Delft, but due to this rejection, he would never be able to take exams there. Since he lacked the interest to become an architect, this didn't bother him too much. He was an artist, that became increasingly clear to him.

May 1954 sees Escher working on Rind. He was inspired by The Invisible Man, an 1897 science fiction novel by the British author H.G. Wells. In it, an invisible man can only be seen by means of the bandages that cover him. Escher changed the man into a woman. To find the right composition, Escher used his wife Jetta as a model. In 1954, he first carried out two studies, reaching a final result in May 1955.

Encounter, from May 1944, and Reptiles are the better-known works Escher produced during the war. He describes Encounter like this:

'Out from a grey surface of a back wall there develops a complicated pattern of white and black humanoid figures. And since people who desire to live need at least a floor to walk on, a floor has been designed for them, with a circular gap in the middle so that as much as possible can still be seen on the back wall. In this way they are forced not only to walk in a ring, but also to meet each other in the foreground: a white optimist and a black pessimist shaking hands with one another.'

During 1937, 1938 and 1939 Escher becomes increasingly fascinated by tessellations, cycles and transformations. He produces Metamorphosis I, Development I, Day and Night, Cycle, Sky and Water I and II and Development II. Most of them are woodcuts. Cycle, from May 1938, is the only lithograph.

After having travelled along the Italian coast on the freighter Rossini by himself, Escher’s wife Jetta joins him on 11 May 1936. They spend a day in Genoa, they visit Pisa and on 13 May they travel on to Savona. Because the ship did not stay long, Escher does not disembark. He takes a photo of a sailing boat that he sees through the porthole of his cabin.