MC Escher: The Complete Story
M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was the Dutch printmaker of impossible staircases, self-drawing hands and birds that dissolve into fish, adored by scientists, ignored for decades by the art world, and never trained in the mathematics everyone assumes he had.
He failed his school exams, including maths. What he had instead was patience and a ruler.
M.C. Escher at a glance
1898. Born in Leeuwarden, the youngest son of a civil engineer.
1922. First stood in the Alhambra, copying Moorish tile patterns into notebooks.
1935. Left Rome for Switzerland as fascism closed in on daily life.
1954. A one man show at the Amsterdam mathematicians’ congress made him the scientists’ favorite artist.
1972. Died at 73 in the Netherlands, in an artists’ retirement home he had entered two years earlier.
A failed student finds a teacher
Born in Leeuwarden in 1898, Escher flunked his secondary school finals and drifted into the Haarlem school of architecture and decorative arts, where the printmaker Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita saw the gift and steered him into graphic art. Escher revered him for life; after de Mesquita was murdered in Auschwitz, Escher kept one of his trampled prints, bootmark and all.
The Alhambra, twice
He visited the Alhambra in Granada in 1922 and again in 1936, copying the Moorish tilings for days. The interlocking patterns became his engine: from them came the tessellations, the birds turning into fish, Day and Night in 1938, and the long Metamorphosis strips where one world morphs into the next.
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Stairs that go nowhere
The famous impossibilities came late.
Relativity, with its three gravities, appeared in 1953; Ascending and Descending, the endless staircase, in 1960, after the mathematician Roger Penrose and his father published the impossible figures Escher then built worlds around.
In 1954 the international congress of mathematicians in Amsterdam mounted an Escher show, and scientists became his first serious public.
The prints he pulled from a ransacked house
His teacher, the printmaker Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, was deported in 1944 and murdered at Auschwitz with his family.
Escher went to the ransacked house and rescued hundreds of Mesquita prints, keeping one that bore a German boot mark.
He spent part of the postwar years securing his teacher’s legacy, and never framed it as heroism.
Seven meters for a post office
His longest work, Metamorphosis III, runs nearly seven meters, one image flowing into the next without a seam.
It was commissioned in the late 1960s for a post office in The Hague.
An enlarged version later moved to Schiphol airport, where travelers walk past it between gates.
Rome, abandoned in 1935
Escher lived in Rome from 1923 and walked the city at night, sketching by lantern light.
When his young son came home in a fascist youth uniform, the family packed for Switzerland.
He said later that after Italy, the landscapes stopped interesting him. The inner worlds began there.
The myth to retire
He is remembered as a mathematician with a printing press. He was nothing of the kind: he worked by eye, cutting and recutting until the paradox held, and corresponded with mathematicians the way a musician who cannot read scores trades tapes with composers. The rigour was real. The equations were not.
Where to see Escher
Escher in Het Paleis, a former royal palace in The Hague, is the dedicated museum. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds a major collection of his prints, and his work tours constantly because, uniquely among modern artists, every generation of teenagers rediscovers him.
The MC Escher questions that keep coming up
What is M.C. Escher famous for? Impossible constructions, tessellations and metamorphoses, in meticulous prints.
Was Escher a mathematician? No. He failed maths at school and worked entirely by eye and instinct.
What inspired his tessellations? The Moorish tile patterns of the Alhambra, which he studied in 1922 and 1936.
Where can I see his work? Escher in Het Paleis in The Hague, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Who was Escher’s teacher? The printmaker Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Escher rescued hundreds of his prints from the ransacked house.
What is Escher’s longest work? Metamorphosis III, nearly seven meters of one image flowing into the next, made for a post office in The Hague and later enlarged for Schiphol airport.
More secrets to unlock
No for Jagger, no for Kubrick
Mick Jagger asked him for an album cover; Escher declined, partly annoyed the letter called him Maarten instead of his initials. Stanley Kubrick got a no as well. The man who drew infinite staircases had very finite patience for celebrity.
