30 August 2025
M.C. Escher's Word-Puzzle Wrapping Paper for De Bijenkorf
In 1933, the graphic artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was living in Rome with his wife Jetta and two young sons Arthur and George. The previous fall he had finished the last of his woodcut illustrations that had been commissioned for the book The Terrible Adventures of Scholastica, written by his friend Jan Walch. At the beginning of the year, Escher had sold more than 20 prints to the print room at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; later in the spring he made a sketching trip to Corsica with a friend, spending almost the whole month of May there, producing 19 drawings to later turn into woodcuts and lithographs [1]. It was likely during that summer that he decided to try to get some new commissions and turned to his hobby of what he called “word-puzzles.” His idea was to design gift-wrapping paper for several well-known department stores.
