Escher today

On 4 July 1935 Escher and his family moved from Rome to the Swiss town Château-d'Oex, after which he traveled almost directly to the Netherlands to arrange things for a long stay in Switzerland. From his parents’ home in The Hague he visited, among other things, his old teacher Jessurun de Mesquita, he consulted with his cousin Anton Escher about a logo for his machine factory, he talks to the Dutch postal service ‘PTT’ and ‘Drukkerij Enschedé’ about his design for the aviation fund stamp and he meets with his friends Jan van der Does the Willebois and Bas Kist.
Between all visits he spends three weeks working on a very detailed, loving portrait of his father.

On 19 August 1960, Escher held a lecture at the Fifth Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography. He was invited to this congress by Prof. Dr Carolina H. MacGillavry, professor in chemical crystallography at the University of Amsterdam. In 1950 she was appointed as the first female member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. MacGillavry was a great admirer of Escher and would go on to publish the book Symmetry Aspects of M.C. Escher’s Periodic Drawings in 1965. For crystallographers, the tessellations on which Escher spent years working in his sketchbooks were ideal teaching materials. His patterns are very well suited to being used to study the symmetry, repetition and reflection that are so characteristic of the field. Below is one of the drawings from Escher’s sketchbooks that was exhibited in Cambridge and is included in the book by MacGillavry.

In March 1965, Escher met the French artist and professor Albert Flocon, lecturer at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Flocon mainly created copper engravings and, like Escher, he was fascinated by the mystery of the perspective. Especially the curvilinear perspective, a form that Escher has also used several times (think of Hand with reflecting sphere, Balcony, Three Spheres II, Drop (Dewdrop) and Self Portrait in Spherical Mirror).
The meeting proved to be of great importance to Escher; Flocon ensured that his prints became known in Paris. The professor personally mediated on the sale of prints and an organized Escher exhibition in Paris. In October 1965 Flocon published a ten-page article about Escher in the important monthly Jardin des Arts.

Today is International Cat Day, a great time to show the cats Escher captured in one of his prints. There are not that many. He often used animals in his work, but his tessellations and metamorphoses mostly feature birds, fish and reptiles. The cats are mainly from his younger years. This is one of those early ones, from when he was 21 years old, around the time he decided to become a graphic artist. On 17 September 1919 he moved to Haarlem. He gets a white cat from his landlady, which would inspire him to produce several woodcuts. On this one the cat lies on the lap of a man who visited Escher in Haarlem. We do not know who it is. Probably one of his childhood friends, Bas Kist or Jan van der Does de Willebois, or his older brother Nol.
See also International Cat Day 2017, featuring a cat on Corsica.

Summer is in full swing. Not the time to be working hard. That is something for autumn, winter and early spring. At least, that was the timetable to which Escher largely adhered throughout his working life. If you look at the months he worked (these are known from 1922 onwards), they usually span September to May. It is a logical consequence of his approach; in spring and summer he went out to get inspiration, to take photos and to draw. In autumn and in winter he developed these preliminary studies into woodcuts, wood engravings and lithographs.
Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions to this rule. 43 exceptions to be precise.

It is 268 years ago today that Johann Sebastian Bach died. On 28 July 1750 the German composer breathed his last breath in Leipzig. Maurits Cornelis Escher was a big fan. The similarities between them were considerable: the mathematical order, the strictness of the rules, the symmetry, the systematic approach.
Escher was particularly fascinated by Bach’s canon. In a letter to his friend Hein ’s-Gravezande in 1940, he wrote:

'Now, I should like to say something else to you about the connection with music, primarily that of Bach, i.e. the Fugue or, put more simply, the canon. I loved Bach and I love him too without “understanding” his technique, but since I understand a (little) bit of it, I love it all the more.'

It is a tropical summer in the Netherlands and what could be more tropical than a palm tree? Certainly, Maurits Cornelis Escher saw something very special in this iconic tree. He was never specific about what he saw, but it is striking how often it recurs in his work. The first of these was created in July 1923 — a stylised palm tree with fronds like parasols, hanging bunches of palm fruits, the scaly trunk and a halo that seems to surround the tree.

On 17 July 1950, Maurits and his youngest son Jan (11 years old) left for Paris, the beginning of a French trip just like the one he had made as a child.

'One hour before arriving in Paris, Jan said: you have to let me know as soon as you see the Eiffel Tower. But in the end he saw it before I did.'

Eldest son Arthur had moved to Lausanne to study geology on the advice of uncle Beer. George had recently enlisted for military service. On this, Escher wrote:

'George has been doing his military service for two weeks now, much to our chagrin, after years of delaying his studies. This is lousy, because you never know whether such a boy will later find the energy to continue studying. [This fear proved to be unfounded.] So we are here with Jantje who, still in primary school, will not be leaving us any time soon. '

In July 1960 Escher completed the last of his four ‘circle limits’. He had struggled with it for a while, but it was a publication by the Canadian professor H.S.M. Coxeter that set him on the right path. He had met this professor at the University of Toronto in 1954, during the International Congress of Mathematicians. In the article, Coxeter described how a tessellation from the centre to the edge of a circle is increasingly reduced and the motifs come to lie infinitely close together. In 1957 Coxeter gave a lecture for the Royal Society of Canada and he asked Escher by letter if he could use a few of the graphic artist’s works in the lecture. Afterwards, Coxeter sent Escher a copy of his lecture (which had been published under the name Crystal Symmetry and its Generalizations), in which he also included the figure about which Escher would become so enthusiastic. Coxeter in turn based this figure on the work of the French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré, who visualised this form of hyperbolic geometry in his Poincaré disc.

In June 1952 Escher created the lithograph Gravity, which due to its subject naturally fits within the series of planetoids and stars that he depicted between 1948 and 1954. His celestial bodies all appear to be set in the same science fiction world, which somehow seems unlikely to be a place where Escher would feel at home. The first wood engraving Stars (1948) seems deceptively simple, but Gravity, Double Planetoid (1948) and Tetrahedral Planetoid (1954) are a lot more complex. These planetoids look as if they might be inhabited by civilisations somewhat like our own.
The planetoid featured in Gravity is a small stellated dodecahedron. Its body has twelve five-pointed stars which are each occupied by a pyramid. Escher loved this spatial figure because it's simple and complex at the same time.