Escher in the Palace

The former 17th-century palace on the Lange Voorhout in The Hague houses the Escher Museum. Designers and mathematicians alike are known to admire Maurits Cornelis Escher, a Dutch graphical artist, for his prints and woodcuts; and I am no exception. So when I had to be in The Hague, I seized the opportunity to visit the museum. M.C. Escher (Mauk to friends) was born in Leeuwarden and grew up in Arnhem. At school he excelled at drawing, but showed little academic aptitude. After he had taken up carpentry he started a studie in architecture, but quickly switched to decorative arts. He was taught by the Samuel de Mesquita. After his first travels in northern Italy and Spain he became greatly influenced by the natural landscape with its sharp contrasts and the geometric Islamic designs he found for instance in the tiles of the Alhambra. He eventually settled in Italy with his family to end up back in the Netherlands after short stays in Switzerland and Belgium. Most of Escher's best known works are from his Dutch period. He died in 1972 aged 73.

In his early works Escher drew from nature, with a special interest in insects, landscapes and leaves. In 1922 he produces 8 portraits (one shown on the left) with the faces divided in several textural planes. In the 1930s he produces many landscapes, streetscapes (in the middle) and still lives, often from extreme vantage points to dramatise the perspective or including visual tricks. The mathematical influence in his work is evident from 1936 onwards, when he starts producing his morphs (an example with moths is shown on the right).

Escher tries to improve on the Moorish grid repetitions to achieve so-called tessellations of one or two separate shapes. The Pegasus on the left is an example as the white winged horsed fit exactly with the red ones that have the same shape. He also worked on spherical tessellations, as the example with bats in the middle shows. In the 1950's he comes into contact with mathematicians who recognize his work as a way of explaining mathematical theory. He then starts producing impossible shapes  of which the everlasting loop (Möbius Strip) -shown on the right with ants- is a good example.