Last week I wrote that Escher hasn't been positively regarded by art critics for years. But in the end he himself was his greatest critic. There are certainly exceptions, but often he was dissatisfied with his latest creation. This varied from ‘this is just not good enough’ and ‘there should be more to it than this’ to ‘this really is a total failure.’ At the end of October 1955 he was again dissatisfied with his work.

Nowadays M.C. Escher may be very popular with both the general public and art critics, but this was certainly not always the case. He has been ignored for years by many art lovers and critics. His work was dismissed as being decorative and was at most technically well made. Contentwise he had nothing to report. This opinion is already reflected in the earliest reviews of the twenties and kept returning in the decades that followed.

On 20 October 1922, Escher creates a drawing that—in retrospect—would have a major impact on his life. He made his first voyage by freighter that autumn, from Amsterdam to the Spanish port city of Málaga. The ship also moored in Alicante and Taragona, after which Escher traveled by train to Barcelona, Madrid, Avila and Toledo. In each city he stayed for a few days to take in the setting properly. On 17 October, after a long and very slow train journey from Toledo, he arrived in Granada. There he visited the beautiful Alhambra. This 14th-century castle was once built as an aristocratic and administrative centre for the last Moorish regime in Spain.

From 2 October 2018 to 13 January 2019, Escher in The Palace will be exhibiting two special woodblocks that Escher cut in May 1957 and the book in which the accompanying prints were published. The blocks and the book stem from the collection of Museum Meermanno in The Hague. Escher in The Palace is proud to be able to exhibit them and we are therefore very grateful to Museum Meermanno for this loan.

As of today Leonardo da Vinci can be seen in the Teylers museum in Haarlem. It is the first major overview ever of original artworks by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) in the Netherlands. Teylers shows 33 drawings of the master and as many works of contemporaries. Da Vinci was not only able to draw and paint beautifully, he is also world famous for his inventions of flying machines and military artillery. He did not see art and science as separate ‘worlds’. For him they had everything to do with each other. This is where Da Vinci and Escher find each other. Both are first and foremost excellent observers. They look at the world with a logical, orderly view and know how to get those observations and the thoughts they derive from them on paper. They both did this with their left hand. Both are also part of popular culture through one or a few works (think of the Mona Lisa and the Vitruvian man and Relativity and Day and Night), but it is questionable if people know who the makers are.

In October 1925 the young couple Maurits and Jetta can finally start setting up their first home. It’s the top floor of a house that is still under construction, in a new neighborhood on the slopes of the Monteverde. The house on Via Alessandro Poerio 100 was beautifully situated with a view of the Tiber valley, in the southeastern part of the city. On the other side of the river was the Monte Palatino, with the Roman quarter Trastevere below. The couple had already bought the house at the end of 1924, but first they had to wait until it was finished, after which it turned out to be too humid. They let it dry all summer and spent those months at the Albergo del Toro in Ravello; the place where they had met.

On September 23, 1957, Escher returned to Amsterdam from a sea voyage with the freighter s.s. Luna. By then, Escher had long been addicted to traveling on cargo ships and he seized every opportunity to book such a trip. In August and September 1957 he bobbed for seven weeks on the Mediterranean Sea while enjoying the waves, the peace, the light and the silence. Back in the Netherlands, he mused on for a while.

Lizards had fascinated him for quite some time, but in the summer and fall of 1956 Escher was particularly busy with them. This fascination came not so much from the behavior or way of life of the creatures, but from the characteristic form. It lent itself very well for making tessellations. In that respect, a lizard (or salamander) interested him as much or as little as birds and fish did. These three animal groups are by far the most common in his work, but they owe that status purely to their form.

Between 1927 and 1938 the Escher family spent almost every summer in the Swiss town of Steckborn, with Jetta’s sister Nina and her husband Oskar Schibler. In 1929 they even stayed for several months, from July to mid October. Escher had already made a trip to the Italian Abruzzo region together with his friend Giuseppe Haas-Triverio in spring. The tour yielded 28 drawings, one of which he developed into a lithograph in Steckborn, his first of an Italian landscape.

During the war years, the volume of new prints Escher produced fell sharply. He lacked inspiration and he had other things . But that does not mean he was not engaged in any creative work. During the war he threw himself into his regular division drawings, constantly devising new variants for filling the plane with regular patterns. Between the outbreak of WWII in 1939 and the Dutch liberation in May 1945, he produced about 35 new drawings.