In a letter to his son Arthur from 27 February 1955 Escher writes about Light in August, a 1932 novel by William Faulkner, which Escher had read it in translation.

'... for — Christ! — that gentleman’s English is so damned difficult. Thanks to the good English lessons you had at secondary school you may well understand the original. I have not read a modern novel that had such an effect on me for many years, probably not since The Plague by Camus. It is partly that the psychological treatment of the murderer, comparable to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, though completely different, is unusually gripping. He is one of those rare writers with whom one dare not find fault as a layman and who towers over most of their contemporaries.'

Convex and Concave is one of Escher’s best-known works, a narrative print brimming with elements that can be interpreted in two ways. Nigh on two years later, in February 1957, he created a lithograph on the same subject, albeit with an image that is a lot more concise.

You have just a few more weeks to see some remarkable wood engravings and woodcuts by Escher up close in The Palace. On 12 March they will be returned to the archive to be replaced by new graphic treasures. Earlier we discussed Grasshopper, Tournai Cathedral and Scarabs. Today we will focus on St. Vincent, martyr.

These photos from Maurits’s private album exude happiness. He and Jetta got to know each other in the spring of 1923. They met in a guest house in Ravenna and their love grew over the next few months.

In the years after the war Escher used to take walks after supper in the woods surrounding his house in Baarn. He spent many hours there, both to clear his head but also to fill it with new ideas for graphic work. From 1951 onwards he started to write them down in his diary. One of these notes from that year goes like this:

'Traces of car and bicycle tires, perspectively seen, diagonally; Sloping recess filled with water: puddle. In it, the moon is reflected.'

He would go on to develop this idea into the woodcut Puddle, from February 1952. He subsequently described this print as follows:

'The cloudless evening sky is reflected in a puddle which a recent shower has left in a woodland path. The tracks of two motor cars, two bicycles and two pedestrians are impressed in the boggy ground.'

On 31 January 1944 Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita was taken away by the Germans. He died in Auschwitz on 11 February. De Mesquita was Escher’s teacher, the man who would convince him to start a career in the graphic arts.

You have just a few more weeks to see some remarkable wood engravings and woodcuts by Escher up close in The Palace. On 28 February they will be returned to the archive to be replaced by new graphic treasures. Earlier we discussed the wood engraving Grasshopper and the woodcut Tournai Cathedral. Today we will focus on Scarabs, a wood engraving from April 1935.

Today is Poetry Day, the start of Poetry Week in the Netherlands. Escher was not a poet, but he had a poetic spirit. He must have had, to create this mind-boggling oeuvre. Moreover, his works lend themselves very well to being used as subject matter for poetry. To mark the occasion of Poetry Day, we are drawing attention to a special publication on Escher, the title page of which comes close to a poem. And if he was not a poet, then he was a troubadour.

Fishes and birds are Escher’s favorite animals. Or, at least, that is what his work seems to suggest. When he was experimenting with tessellations in the late 1930s, he arrived at these shapes quite soon. They lend themselves very well to the juggling act that is needed for this technique. Which is why they keep popping up in his work. Individually, like in Day and Night, Sun and Moon, Liberation, Fishes, Swans, Depth, Three Worlds and Whirlpools. In combination with other animals, but often also together. Consider in this regard Sky and Water I and II, Metamorphosis II, Predestination and Two Intersecting Planes.

Between 26 April and 28 June 1936 Escher takes a round trip by freighter along the shores of Italy and Spain. He also travels inland by train. His wife Jetta accompanies him on a section of this trip. The couple enjoyed themselves immensely. They had moved to Switzerland the year before and were missing Italy terribly. On 13 June Escher arrived in Livorno by freighter. Jetta had travelled back the day before.
From his travel journal:

'At 10.10 I journeyed to Pisa by train. From the Piazza Vittorio I took the trolleybus-cum-tram to the station, the same model as I saw running back and forth between Venice Mestre—a very pleasant and fast connection. In Pisa by 10.30 and then on to the Duomo by tram. From the first gallery of the Leaning Tower I did a drawing of the cathedral, on which I worked constantly until 3.30. At the station I ate something hurriedly and took the train back to Livorno at 4.18’

On 14 January 1898 Lewis Carroll, the British author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, died. Carroll passed away five months before Escher was born. Although their paths never crossed, the author and the artist have a lot in common. Both were frighteningly thin, both were addicted to long walks, both were obsessed by documenting the minutiae of their daily life, both were mad about chess and intrigued by game elements and by using these in their work.

The dazzling print Other World is one of Escher’s masterpieces. And rightly so. He created this combination of woodcut and wood engraving in January 1947. It is like looking through the windows of a brick room upon a crater-filled lunar surface. This is remarkable in itself, but what makes this print really impressive is that Escher combines three views (nadir, horizon and zenith) on this moon in one image.

The first post this year: a skull. Not the most obvious choice but for Escher it is not all that strange. He created several skulls and skeletons. Stand-alone works but also as part of a poster or a bookplate. This is the very first one, from January 1917. Maurits is 18 and fascinated by this symbol of mortality. In his youth in particular it kept him occupied, which is not that strange for a brooding adolescent.

We've reached the end of 2017. On Facebook and here, on Escher today, we brought you nearly 100 short stories and anecdotes 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 we will keep providing you with stories in 2018!

21 December, winter begins. Not Escher's favourite season, although during this time of the year he was most productive. He had no choice, there was nowhere else to go. For years he would travel during spring and summer and these trips would bring him inspiration for his prints. During autumn and winter, he would use his travel drawings and photo's for new woodcuts, wood engravings and lithographs. But the cold and snow that accompanied the winter months did not appeal to him much.

December 1938 is an ice-cold month in Brussels. A perfect setting for a little woodcut (18 x 14 cm) which Escher created shortly before for the Dutch critic and poet Jan Greshoff, who also lived in Brussels. For his 50th birthday on 15 December 1938, Greshoff’s friends offered him this woodcut, showing a wintry Brussels with his own house as a shiny beacon.

On 12 December 1934 the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome hosted the opening of an exhibition with paintings and drawings by Otto B. Kat (a personal friend of Maurits) and woodcuts and lithographs by M.C. Escher. Despite the rainy conditions, interest in the opening was huge. Fascism’s grip on Italian society was growing stronger by the day and this exhibition seemed to be used by many as counterbalance. World leaders as well as religious authorities were present, as were several directors of foreign institutions, museum directors, artists and critics.

On 8 December 1928 Arthur Eduard Escher was born, the second son of Maurits and Jetta. Arthur (named after Jetta’s father) was preceded by George in 1926 and followed by Jan in 1938. It was a complicated delivery and Jetta had to stay in hospital for several weeks. Just as he would do for Jan ten years later, Escher created a woodcut dedicated to the birth. He also made photos of the newborn and his brother.

Maurits, Jetta and their two sons spent July and August of 1934 in the artists’ village of Saint-Idesbald. The village is home to several museums, including that of the world-famous surrealist painter Paul Delvaux. Escher had rented a house there, together with his brother Eddy and sister-in-law Irma. During that holiday, Escher and Jetta visited Ghent, Bruges and Tournai. That same holiday Escher created a woodcut of the cathedrals of Ghent and Tournai.

Between 1948 and 1954 Escher created a series of planetoids and stars. These celestial bodies all appear to be set in the same science fiction world, a world that at first glance seems alien to the earthly, austere artist. The series began with the wood engraving Stars, which features two chameleons interlocked in a system of regular octahedrons.

This week we had a slight change in terms of the works being exhibited. Some were returned to the archive and were replaced by a series of other works by Escher. One of these is Grasshopper, a wood engraving from March 1935. In very fine detail Escher shows a specimen of this winged insect with its powerful hind legs, compound eyes, antennae and folded wings.

Studying concepts like eternity and infinity in his work was definitely an obsession for Escher. He explored countless ways of suggesting boundlessness within the limited frame of his woodblock or his lithography stone. One of the ways he approached this was playing with depth and perspective. By varying the thickness of lines, sizes of shapes and foreground versus background, he achieved this sense of infinite space in a number of works.

Although he was fascinated by the concept of the regular division of the plane even early on in his career, it was not until 1936 that Escher tackled it in earnest. A period ensued in which he performed countless experiments with ways of filling a plane with patterns of geometric shapes. He did this in the form of drawings which he did in a notebook with a view to mastering the research process.

On 16 November 1953 Escher gave a lecture to the Friends of the Stedelijk Museum in Alkmaar, on the occasion of an exhibition of his work. During those years Escher had frequent opportunities to exhibit in museums, art galleries and universities, often together with two or more fellow members of the Association of Dutch Graphic Artists. He would usually accompany these exhibitions with a lecture on his own work.

At the end of 1933, Escher started to explore the possibilities of applying his work to commercial assignments. The first attempt was a design for wrapping paper. He hoped to sell it to a number of large department stores: de Bijenkorf, Gerzon, Zingone and Korall. Using their logos as motifs, he created several patterns that could be printed on wrapping paper. He also experimented with the names by making them interlock in playful ways. 

Early November 1957 Escher finished his woodcut and wood engraving Whirlpools. He used a new printing technique for it, cutting one block which he printed on the same piece of paper in two colours.

Partly because of his friendship with Bas Kist, Mauk (as he was called in his younger days) Escher started to focus more on his drawing in 1917-18. In Bas he found an equal who took to drawing as much as he did. Together they also went looking for the secrets of the linocut and woodcut. Drawing and graphic arts became more important to them than school.

In October 1939, while Europe stood on the brink of World War II, Escher started working on his big Metamorphosis II (19.5 x 400 cm). He worked on it continuously for nearly six months. During these months he wrote several letters to his friend Hein ’s-Gravezande that make manifest his obsession with this woodcut. He wrote detailed accounts of his intentions and working methods and he extemporised on the possible meaning of the colours, the fish, the bees, the birds and the (Saracen?) tower.

In 1951 the magazines Time and Life published interviews with M.C. Escher, both done by journalist Israel Shenker. These publications fuelled international interest in his work, but in 1954 things really got out of hand. In September Escher had a successful International Congress of Mathematicians 1954 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, followed by another one in the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C. He sold 86 out of 114 prints (for over 13,000 guilders), a result never before achieved by a Dutch graphic artist in the US.

In October 1956 Escher created the woodcut and wood engraving Smaller and Smaller. It is the most detailed of all his prints. The ultimate expression of his abilities.

Escher visited the desolate island of Corsica several times. He was fascinated by the rock formations, the dizzying elevations, the mountain ranges, chasms, rivers, bays and coastline. He did many drawings and took many photos and his travels gave rise to a series of woodcuts, wood engravings and lithographs.

Due to the latest change of displayed works, a number of works that are part of a series can now be seen in Room 1: nine (of the 25 in total) woodcuts from the Emblemata series Escher produced in 1931. Earlier we showed you Toadstool from this series, today we focus your attention on Butterfly. In this woodcut Escher puts a butterfly in a richly ornamented palette of flowers and plants.

In September 1941 Escher started on his woodcut Fish, the first work he produced after moving to Baarn. In his diary he wrote about the process:

12 Sep: 'At night fish woodcut idea.'
13 Sep: 'Started on it.'
07 Oct: 'Started on 1st block Fish.'
16 Oct: 'Started on 2nd block Fish.'
23 Oct: 'Started on 3rd block Fish.'

The liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945 was personally as well as artistically liberating for Maurits Escher. In the second half of that year he produced Balcony, Doric Columns, Three Spheres I and a woodcut for the 'Tijdelijke Academie (Temporary Academy)' in Eindhoven. He was also working on the lithograph Magic Mirror, which would be completed in January 1946. In Three Spheres I, from September that year, he very precisely demonstrates how to evoke a three-dimensional form on a flat surface.

In September 1935 Maurits Cornelis Escher made a woodcut for his cousin Anne Escher (1895-1971), the founder and director of engineering company Ir. Escher's Constructiewerkplaatsen en Machinefabriek N.V. The company, founded in 1925, would grow into a major metalworking company, which by the 1950s had the largest factory hall in The Hague.
In 1930 the company started using stick welding. Maurits Escher used the welder with his distinctive hood for the woodcut, which was to be used as a logo for his cousin.

In December 1938 Escher received a government commission to create 10 woodcuts for a booklet on Delft. For the not insubstantial sum of 800 guilders (about €7,500 now). The commission was inspired by a series he created in 1934, called Nocturnal Rome. In the end, the book was never published, but he did produce the woodcuts. Since this series is the only one he made about a Dutch city, the outcome is rather special. 

'He's an adorable, sweet and beautiful child. Definitely not a freak,'