(Self Portrait in a Chair 1920 woodcut)
- Early life -
Maurits Cornelis, or Mauk as he came to be nicknamed, was born in Leeuwarden (Friesland), the Netherlands. He was the youngest son of civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. In 1903, the family moved to Arnhem where he took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen years old.
From 1903 until 1918 he attended primary and secondary school. Though he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor, and he was required to repeat the course twice. In 1919, Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He briefly studied architecture, but switched to decorative arts and studied under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, a Jew with Portuguese ancestors with whom he would remain friends for years. In 1922 Escher left the school, having gained experience in drawing and making woodcuts.
- Later life -
In 1922, a crucial year in his life, Escher traveled through Italy (Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena) and Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada). He was impressed by the Italian countryside and by the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain. He came back to Italy regularly in the following years. It was in Italy that he first met Jetta Umiker, the woman whom he married in 1924. The young couple settled down in Rome and stayed there until 1935, when the political climate under Mussolini became unbearable. The family next moved to Château-d'Œx, Switzerland where they remained for two years.
Escher, who had been very fond of and inspired by the landscape in Italy, was decidedly unhappy in Switzerland, so in 1937, the family moved again, to Ukkel, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. World War II forced them to move for the last time in January 1941, this time to Baarn, the Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970.
On April 30, 1955, Escher was awarded a Knighthood of the Order of Orange-Nassau.
Most of Escher's better-known pictures date from this period. The sometimes cloudy, cold, wet weather of the Netherlands allowed him to focus intently on his works, and only during 1962, when he endured surgery, was there a time when no new images were created.
Escher moved to the Rosa-Spier house in Laren in 1970, a retirement home for artists where he could have a studio of his own. He died at the home on 27 March 1972, at 73 years of age.
print gallery
still life with relecting globe
tetrahedral planetoid
ascending and descending
relativity
concave and convex
dragon
drawing hands
reptiles