Dali House

scher’s fame preceded him across the Atlantic with the publication of articles about him in Time and Life in 1951, with boosted orders for his work.

He had his first one-man exhibition in the United States in Washington, and was in demand as a lecturer, both to arts and science followers, in the US and Canada. Shown here is a computation of an Escher tesselation, and above, “Order and Chaos” from 1950.

British-born HSM Coxeter (1907-2003), pictured here, was a mathematician at the University of Toronto when he met MC Escher in Amsterdam in 1954. They began a correspondence that continued until the latter’s death.

“I’m engrossed again in the study of an illustration which I came across in a publication of [Coxeter],” Maurits wrote. “I am trying to glean from it a method for reducing a plane-filling motif which goes from the centre of a circle out to the edge, where the motifs will be infinitely close together. His hocus-pocus text is no use to me at all, but the picture can probably help me …”

Coxeter inspired Escher’s interest in hyperbolic tessellations — regular tilings of the hyperbolic plane, as seen in his “Circle Limit” series. Years later Coxeter finally worked out the math in these images, and acknowledged that his old friend had “got it absolutely right, to the millimetre. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to see my mathematical vindication.” It’s been noted among his plane-field tesselations, that prior to 1958, all save one show objects shrinking toward the centre, and afterward, objects shrink toward the outer edges.

Maurits had just arrived in Toronto in 1964 on another lecture tour when he fell ill and had to undergo surgery at a local hospital. The photo shows him on his 1961 visit to Toronto, meeting his granddaughter for the first time at son George’s home

The National Gallery of Canada boasts more than 160 Escher prints and related works given to it by the artist’s eldest son George Escher, who immigrated to Canada in 1958 and was by the time of the bequest a resident of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. George had the help and advice of Cornelius Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy, in dispersing his collection, particularly the pieces that went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

In “Belvedere”, produced in 1958, a man sits at the foot of an impossible building trying to assemble an impossible cube from a diagram of a Necker cube. The woman climbing the steps nearby is modelled after a figure from Hieronymus Bosch’s 1500 triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

In April 1955 Maurits was one of several hundred Dutch citizens honoured on the queen’s birthday by being awarded a Knighthood of the Order of Orange-Nassau.

In a letter to his son Arthur, Maurits described the town clerk arriving at his door with the medal. “He made some unsuccessful attempts to pin this weighty object onto my chest, but he was too nervous – or the safety pin would not go through my lapels. At any rate, your dad is a knight … Why in the world they should want to ‘decorate’ me is a complete mystery … Did you ever imagine that your dad, who lives so far away from the bustle and intrigue of the world, working on his prints day after day like a hermit, would some day be drawn into the sickening scene of vain officialdom, despite himself?”

In 1957 Escher received a commission to do a wall mural in Utrecht. I’ve been unable to find out more about it, but there have been Escher exhibitions here at the Centraal Museum, founded in 1838 in a former mediaeval cloister, renovated in 1999. The mural, several other projects and another trip around Europe kept Maurits busy through 1958.

In May 1956 Escher wrote to his son Arthur to announce that he’d finished “Print Gallery”, “the odd print I told you about last time. I don’t think I have ever done anything as peculiar in my life. Among other things, it shows a young man looking with interest at a print on the wall of an exhibition that features himself. How can this be? Perhaps I am not far removed from Einstein’s curved universe.”

The lithograph gets a thorough mathematical analysis at this brainy website.

In August 1960, just after the publication of “Grafiek en Tekeningen”, the first book of Escher’s prints, he had an exhibition and lectures in conjunction with the Congress of the International Union of Crystallography in Cambridge, England. He was not only the scientists’ guest of honour, but the only artist among them.

His works employing the repeated tilings called tessellations were much appreciated by the crystallographers, but they no doubt enjoyed his other constructions as well, such as “Gravity”, shown here.

The city of Hilversum awarded Escher its cultural prize in 1965, the same year that crystallographer Caroline MacGillavry published her “Symmetry Aspects of MC Escher’s Periodic Drawings”. The following year saw him profiled in both Jardin des Arts and Scientific American. Shown here is a detail from 1955’s “Convex and Concave”.

In 1967 Escher loaned a copy of each of his prints to the Haags Gemeentemuseum, home to a large Vermeer collection (the Google Earth view focuses on a statue in the pool out front). The rest of his copies went to his sons, which they subsequently sold to American collectors or donated to museums. Canada’s National Gallery was George Escher’s primary beneficiary.

In 1968 there were major exhibitions both at the Gemeentemuseum and at the Mickelson Gallery in Washington, DC, and throughout the summer of 2000 the Gemeentemuseum honoured Escher with a show of his best-known prints, including early works from its collection and rarely seen studies and drawings. Shown here is “Reptiles”.

The Kerkplein Post Office, near The Hague’s Gerte Kerk and old city hall, does a typical amount of business for a postal station despite the fact that this one has MC Escher’s largest creation lining its walls.

He designed “Metamorphosis III” specifically for the post office in 1968. The 58-metre-long, nearly two-metre-high work was hand-painted on site by others, under his supervision. It was unveiled in February 1969, circumnavigating the walls. Few tourists know about it.

This photo of an Escher-inspired relief sculpture on the exterior of a Houtrust water-purifying plant in The Hague comes from Piet Musterd’s Flickr page.

In Baarn at the end of 1968, Escher was suddenly without a wife. Never happy living there, Jetta moved back to Switzerland. “My mother had enough of playing second fiddle, so to speak,” their son George said. “Her whole life she did. And she left him.” Shown here “Rind”, designed in 1955 from a bust of Jetta made by an Italian sculptor, and below, “Bond of Union” from 1958, depicting both of them.

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In July 1969 Maurits completed his last graphic work, the woodcut “Snakes”, and the following year, after further operations, he moved into the Rosa Spier House in Laren, a retirement home for artists where he could have a studio of his own, though obviously he made little use of it.

The home, named for musician Rosa Spier (1891-1967), had just opened. “A lovely place,” his son George called it, “where he had a room for himself, service for food, etc, what he wanted, and his own atelier, and people around him of the same type … painters, graphic artists, musicians, you name it. He spent the last few years of his life very pleasantly, really. But he could not produce new work any more. He wrote and wrote letters and sold prints.”

In March 1972, Escher’s health deteriorated and he was taken to a hospital here in Hilversum, where family members took turns sitting at his bedside. The image is a close-up of “Eye” from 1946.

On March 27, 1972 – having lived long enough to see the book “The World of MC Escher” translated into English and spread his fame even further – Maurits Cornelius Escher died at age 73.

Beloved as a genius of optical illusions, Escher never created an optical illusion (though he continues to inspire many). His work was a cross-fertilisation of scientific formulae and the thinking-man’s art of Leonardo and Durer. The multitude of esoteric allusions overlaid on his art would have caused him chagrin, but he’d probably get a kick out of the ubiquitous T-shirts like this one from WorldofEscher.com.

The MC Escher Foundation remains ambitious about establishing a permament Escher museum, but for now the Lange Voorhout Palace is doing an intriguing job.

The modest 18th-century palace was the home of Holland’s Queen Emma until 1891, then the reception hall of Queens Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix. At the moment it is dedicated to Escher, complete with a 360-degree virtual-reality journey through his life and work, called “The Escher Experience”.

All works by MC Escher are copyrighted by Cordon Art of Baarn, the Netherlands. Excellent background information and/or image reproductions can be found at the official Escher website as well as here and here and here.

The National Gallery of Canada has not only terrific images from its large collection of Escher works and an overview of his techniques, but a biography based on the recollections of Escher’s eldest son, who donated the prints.