m. c. escher

a traveling family

The Escher family is enterprising and adventurous. Maurits, nicknamed 'Mauk', is the youngest of five sons who grow up in luxury. The family regularly goes on vacation, which is quite unusual for the time.
Father Escher gives his sons a broadly oriented education. Young Maurits plays the cello and piano, takes carpentry lessons and learns woodworking. Father Escher even had a stargazer installed on the roof of their villa.
At the age of fifteen, Maurits goes abroad for the first time. The Eschers travel via the Breton coast to Paris. That makes a big impression. Maurits records everything with his newly acquired camera.

an artist awakens

When Maurits is 21 years old, he’s going to study in Haarlem. At the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, at the insistence of his parents, he starts studying architecture. However, a prominent graphic teacher, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, has seen Maurits' linoleum cuts and encourages him to become a graphic artist. Father Escher reluctantly gives his blessing.

Maurits moves into rooms in Haarlem. There he finds a lot of practice material in his immediate environment. For example, he regularly uses family and housemates as models and draws the things in his room. He also receives a white cat from his landlady, which he captures several times. This cat print does not go unnoticed. Two months later the woodcut is published in the weekly magazine Eigen Haard.
Maurits is completely at the right place. He will focus on the 'graphic and decorative arts, in particular the woodcut'. In his student room he practices day in and day out, in every conceivable style. Meanwhile he searches for his own subject. Carefully, the interest in unusual perspectives, reflections and repetition emerges.

As soon as he completes his school, Maurits spreads his wings. He is gripped by travel fever and leaves for a foreign country. Maurits, 24, is leaving for Italy for a few months to sketch the landscape.

The Italian landscape becomes Maurits' new muse. The rough landscape with rocky coasts and jagged hills, the densely packed mountain villages with squares, towers and houses with sloping roofs - Escher can't get enough of it. He often goes out with his travel easel and his sketch pad. Along the way, Maurits appropriates the landscape while drawing. In countless sketches he captures the shapes of untouched Italy, while remaining close to nature. He does, however, like to opt for points of view that emphasize height or depth.

love and progress

Maurits not only finds inspiration in Italy, love also crosses his path. On one of his hikes, he meets a girl from Switzerland in the village of Ravello: Giulia Umiker, known as Giulietta or Jetta. She is on vacation with her parents. After her departure, Maurits writes her passionate letters.
He's successful. The love turns out to be mutual and a year later they are married. Maurits and Jetta get married in small company in the seaside resort of Viareggio. They settle in Rome, where Maurits can buy a house with financial support from his father. He also sets up his studio there. In 1926 Jetta and Maurits become parents of George. Escher finds him 'adorable, sweet and beautiful'. Two years later son Arthur follows. Jan, the third son, is born in 1938.

In the meantime, Escher's career is slowly taking off. The newlywed Maurits makes a series of six woodcuts about the days of creation. The twenty-something gets exhibitions in Italy, but also in the Netherlands. Together with sixteen other woodcuts and more than forty drawings, he exhibits them in his hometown of Rome at the association of Roman engravers. He makes the announcement poster himself. The reviews, which also appear in the Netherlands, are generally positive. The Second Day of Creation is especially popular. And although the press sometimes finds his work 'too reasoned', he sells his first prints.

experimenting

Around his thirtieth birthday, Escher's passion for traveling and drawing begins to bear fruit. He now has so much experience with depicting landscapes that he can start playing with it. He is increasingly trying out striking perspectives and image compilations.
Escher calls the prints from this period 'finger exercises'. In his work he slowly begins to experiment with representation and perception. He sometimes uses different sketches to compose new images. In addition, he rediscovers mirrors and reflections as a means to merge different worlds.
Due to the crisis, sales of his prints are falling. As a result, it’s not easy for him financially. Still, his fame is growing. He exhibits in the Netherlands and Italy and even in America people are interested in his work.

rome by night

Although Escher has lived in Rome for thirteen years, the lavish city does not inspire him much during the day. That changes when the spotlights are turned on at night. This is the Rome he loves: an empty city full of vistas and contrasts, 'as in a wonderful dream'.
In the evening, Maurits likes to walk through his city. To be able to draw, he hangs a flashlight on a button of his coat. He records the illuminated Rome on dark paper with white pastels.
In a month and a half he elaborates the drawings into twelve woodcuts. He uses different shadings for each woodcut: from squares and diamond shapes to horizontal or diagonal lines.

breakthrough in spain

When Italian fascism gets too close, the Escher family moves to Switzerland. Maurits, however, becomes deeply unhappy about the shapeless, snow-covered mountains. He wants to travel again.
When Escher lives in Switzerland, he longs for the sea. He asks an Italian shipping company if he and Jetta can sail on their cargo ships for two months. They leave for Spain by freighter. In return, the shipping company will later receive a number of prints for which he will make the drawings en route. Maurits experiences the boat trip in tumultuous Europe as an 'oasis of peace'. Melancholy, he says goodbye to the ship.
In Spain he visits the Alhambra in Granada. Although Maurits has been there before, he now looks at the richly decorated palace with new eyes. The complex geometric patterns, with their timeless, endless repetition hit him like sledgehammer blows. For days he copies the Arabic motifs in the palace.
It is the last step towards the inventive images that will make Escher famous. Maurits' work shifts from landscapes to 'image thoughts'.

inner worlds

“Italy, the landscape, the people, they mean something to me. Not Switzerland and much less Holland,' Escher explains in 1968. After a period in Switzerland and Belgium, he returned to the Netherlands due to the outbreak of the Second World War. They move into a house in Baarn in 1941, but the house of the Escher family is requisitioned by the Germans in 1943. They find asylum and are taken care of in 'villa Ekeby' by a befriended bank manager D.W.H. Patin. Despite his homesickness for Italy, he continues to live in Baarn for the rest of his life.

The landscape is no longer his primary source of inspiration. Now Escher turns his gaze to his inner world. He starts by making 'regular tessellations' that grow into complex mathematical images. His love for surprising perspectives and reflections results in the creation of impossible worlds.
This 'new Escher' is catching on. He has exhibitions in leading museums and publications in international magazines. His iconic works will endear him to this day.

peace and regularity

As the years go by, Escher's work becomes more and more conceptual. In his latest prints he mainly focuses on the beauty of the laws of nature. In the work he shows 'a clean, ordered world', in which harmony and regularity are paramount.
Meanwhile, Escher tirelessly explains his work to others. He turns out to be a glowing speaker and writes about his theories. He also corresponds with mathematicians, although he explicitly does not see himself as a mathematician.

He is so busy making reprints, business correspondence, exhibitions and commissions that he hardly ever gets around to making new work. In the last decade of his life he made only ten new prints.

Escher spent his last years in the Rosa Spierhuis in Laren, a nursing home for artists and scientists. At the age of 73, Escher dies in the Diakonessenhuis in Hilversum.