M. C. Escher

Maurits Cornelis Escher, born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, was a Dutch graphic artist known for his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, with much of his work drawing on mathematical ideas. Despite his widespread popularity, the art world largely overlooked him for most of his life, even in his home country. He was 70 before he received a retrospective exhibition. By the late 1900s, his reputation grew, and in the 2000s, exhibitions around the globe have celebrated his art.

His pieces often feature mathematical concepts and objects: impossible objects, infinite spaces, reflections, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Though Escher considered himself lacking in mathematical skill, he corresponded with mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, as well as crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and independently studied tessellation. Early on, nature inspired him—he sketched insects, landscapes, and plants like lichens, incorporating them as details. He traveled through Italy and Spain, drawing buildings, townscapes, architecture, and the tile patterns of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, growing increasingly fascinated by their mathematical structure.

Escher’s art gained recognition among scientists, mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after Martin Gardner featured it in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in *Scientific American*. His work has appeared on book and album covers and in technical papers. It was a major inspiration for Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1979 book *Gödel, Escher, Bach*.

Escher was the youngest son of civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. The family moved to Arnhem in 1903, where he attended school until 1918. Called “Mauk” by friends and family, he was often ill and was sent to a special school at age seven, failing second grade. Though he drew well, his grades were generally poor. He studied carpentry and piano until age 13. In 1918, he entered the Technical College of Delft, and from 1919 to 1922 attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, learning drawing and woodcut techniques. He briefly studied architecture but failed several subjects—partly due to a persistent skin infection—and switched to decorative arts under graphic artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.

In 1922, a pivotal year, Escher traveled through Italy, visiting Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena, and Ravello, and then Spain, seeing Madrid, Toledo, and Granada. The Italian countryside and the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra in Granada impressed him deeply. The Alhambra’s intricate geometric tile patterns and sculpted designs, based on symmetrical, interlocking repetitive motifs, sparked his interest in the mathematics of tessellation and became a major influence. From 1923 to 1935, he lived in Rome. There he met Jetta Umiker, a Swiss woman also drawn to Italy, and they married in 1924. They settled in Rome, where their first son, Giorgio, was born; later came Arthur and Jan. He traveled frequently within Italy, visiting Viterbo, the Abruzzi, Corsica, Calabria, the Amalfi coast, Gargano, and Sicily, and the landscapes and townscapes of these places appear in his art. In May and June 1936, he returned to Spain, revisiting the Alhambra and spending days meticulously drawing its mosaic patterns. He became obsessed with tessellation, calling it an absorbing addiction. These sketches became a major source for his later work. He also studied the architecture of the Mezquita in Cordoba. This was his last long study journey; after 1937, he created his art in his studio. His work shifted sharply from observational, realistic depictions of nature and architecture to pieces born from geometric analysis and visual imagination, though even his early work shows an interest in space, perspective, and multiple viewpoints.

In 1935, the political climate under Mussolini became intolerable for Escher. Though uninterested in politics, he disliked fanaticism and hypocrisy. When his eldest son was forced to wear a Ballila uniform at school, the family left Italy for Château-d'Œx, Switzerland, staying two years. In 1935, the Netherlands post office commissioned him to design a semi-postal stamp for the Air Fund, and again in 1949 he designed Dutch stamps for the 75th anniversary.