With over 120 prints in our museum, the most famous works from the oeuvre of M.C. Escher (1898-1972) are permanently on display at Escher in The Palace. These magnificent prints are being exhibited in a regal setting: the former winter palace of Queen Emma, the Queen Mother.
Maura Biava was the first artist to create underwater photography in the early 1990s. Accompanied by a photographer and a diver, she herself would dive metres deep into the sea with costumes and objects for a photo series or a video of her performance. Every minute she was supplied with air so that she could stay underwater for an hour. This method alone could be called magical.
Joris Escher, M.C. Escher’s great-nephew, has fond memories of his great-uncle. His discovery of two unknown drawings by Escher at the bottom of a Chinese 19th-century lacquerware box marked the start of Joris’s quest to discover the origins of the famous printmaker’s fascinations. Who was his uncle Mauk, and how did he become Escher?
The talented Julie de Graag was one of Escher’s contemporaries, who died exactly 100 years ago this year. She shared a love of nature with M.C. Escher. Her woodcuts managed, in just a few details, to capture the essence of plants, animals and portrait subjects. De Graag’s work will be shown at Escher in The Palace alongside that of Escher.
Jehoshua Rozenman’s sculptures are not as they first appear. They seem robust, monumental, but they are in fact made of fragile glass. Rozenman’s mysterious sculptures depict impossible, secretive buildings that appear to come from another dimension.
The themes close to M.C. Escher's heart are still alive and kicking. Even today, we see artists incorporating optical illusion, reflection, nature and architecture into their artworks. In the major autumn exhibition Just Like Escher, Escher in The Palace shows how contemporary artists and designers such as Damien Hirst, Iris van Herpen, Chris Ofili and Carlijn Kingma challenge Escher's ideas.
In 2023 it is 125 years since Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) was born. Escher is a celebrated artist, but this would not have been the case had it not been for his mentor and good friend Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868-1944). The striking work of De Mesquita hangs alongside that of his most famous pupil at Escher in The Palace.
This week, a long-concealed self-portrait of Rembrandt is set to return to The Hague. From Tuesday 29 November onwards, it will be on display in Escher in The Palace, which was home to it from 1850 to 1894, when the palace belonged successively to Prince Hendrik of the Netherlands and his sister Great Duchess Sophie. The painting has not been seen in the Netherlands since 1898 – for nearly 125 years – and has not even been on public display since 1967.