In July 1933, M. C. Escher kept returning to the beach at Scheveningen around midnight. He was watching the surf glow. Back in his studio, he experimented with splashed marks on a lithographic stone, trying to find a way of printing the light he had seen on the water. The resulting image, Phosphorescent Sea, contains none of his famous impossible staircases. It records something that happened outside, in the dark, while most people were asleep.
That patient, slightly obsessive observer is worth getting to know. Escher's reputation as a maker of visual puzzles can make his career seem like an exercise in ingenuity: another staircase, another clever deception. Spend time with his earlier prints, however, and a more varied artist emerges. He followed the shadows through Italian buildings, illustrated a witchcraft story, studied an insect closely enough to turn it into a convincing nightmare, and borrowed a monstrous figure from Hieronymus Bosch. Later, even as his geometrical constructions grew more elaborate, a woodland puddle could still occupy his imagination.
The nine works below follow that career from 1931 to 1955. Their subjects range from a haunted interior to an apparently ordinary pond. What connects them is Escher's interest in the way a picture persuades us to believe in a place, and in how much can happen when that belief becomes uncertain.
Before The Impossible Buildings
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in Leeuwarden in 1898. His route into art involved a change of direction: at Haarlem's School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita recognised his ability and encouraged him to concentrate on the graphic arts. The official biography describes the importance of that intervention. Architecture remained a lasting subject, but printmaking became his profession.
The distinction helps explain the character of these images. The V&A’s guide to printmaking sets out the processes behind them. In a woodcut, the artist cuts away areas of a block that are to remain unprinted; the raised surface carries the ink. Wood engraving uses the end grain of the wood and allows exceptionally fine incisions. In both, a pale line can be the result of material removed. Lithography works differently: a drawing is made on a flat surface, traditionally stone, and printed through the differing behaviour of grease and water. It can accommodate grainy shadows and delicate changes of tone alongside firm outlines.
Escher chose between these methods with a practical eye. The minute pale cuts of Stars describe a rigid framework suspended against blackness. The greys of Encounter help flat silhouettes become rounded bodies. Following the marks is part of following the thought: the image depends on what the medium can make visible.
Poltergeist: A Ghost Story With A Real Address
The room in Poltergeist is crowded before we have worked out what inhabits it. A seated figure and the fireplace offer a foothold in an ordinary interior; above them, a grinning presence makes the darkness suddenly suspect. The sharp divisions of black and white give furniture and shadows an almost equal solidity. It is easy to imagine a face in this room, then become unsure where the face ends and the room resumes.
This was a literary commission with a particular geographical setting. Jan Walch's The Terrible Adventures of Scholastica takes place in Oudewater, the Dutch town associated with a witches' weighhouse. Escher and Walch visited together in 1931, and Escher collected photographs and postcards for reference. The project eventually involved six large and thirteen small woodcuts, together with vignettes. The museum identifies this illustration as the woodcut on page 11, made in October 1931; the book appeared in 1933. Those are separate dates, belonging to the image and its publication.
The commission also sits near the end of Escher's career as a book illustrator. Years later, when declining another literary project, he explained his growing preference for giving form to his own ideas. Scholastica was his last illustrated book. Seen in that light, this small supernatural scene catches him working within another writer's invention, shortly before his own invented worlds became his central occupation.
Its effect is immediate, though. The face overhead changes how we read every other shadow. We begin scanning the woodwork and the corners for further disturbances. Escher has made the viewer behave like someone listening to an unexplained noise in a familiar house.
Cloister At Monreale: The Discipline Of Looking
The shift to Monreale is a relief: daylight, stone, a building that can be visited. Yet the view is carefully controlled. The foreground arch and columns occupy much of the sheet, and the tower beyond is revealed through their opening. We do not receive a convenient, comprehensive description of the place. We have been given a position inside it.
Escher travelled through Sicily in the spring of 1932 with the painter Giuseppe Haas-Triverio. Their itinerary took in towns, volcanic landscapes and ancient monuments, as well as the cathedral cloister at Monreale. A surviving photograph places Haas-Triverio there on 19 May. Escher made the wood engraving the following March, working from the material gathered on the trip. The museum's account of the journey makes clear that the finished print followed a period of drawing and later studio work.
Look at the different jobs performed by the marks. The decoration of the columns needs small, insistent detail, while broad areas of dark ink hold the shaded arch together. Beyond it, the tower appears remarkably bright. The darkness around the opening functions almost like the aperture of a camera, restricting the view and concentrating the light.
There is a temptation to treat every early architectural print as preparation for an impossible building. Monreale deserves to be looked at on its own terms. The pleasure here comes from the relationship between a sheltered viewing position and the sunlit space outside. Escher lets the building organise the picture: its openings determine what we can see, and its surfaces determine where our attention rests. His later inventions would make those architectural rules unstable. Here he is discovering how effectively they can guide us.
Phosphorescent Sea: The Night The Water Lit Up
The pale crests in this lithograph have a particular cause. Escher was observing sea sparkle, the light produced by marine organisms when the water is disturbed. In July 1933 he repeatedly watched the shoreline at Scheveningen late at night, then worked on a splashing technique in the studio to describe the movement and luminosity of the waves. Escher in The Palace records those experiments and dates the lithograph to that month. Its museum title is Phosphorescent Sea; the same image appears in our catalogue as Fluorescent Sea.
Knowing this changes the experience of looking. Those broken white edges record an observed phenomenon. They follow the water's agitation, making the wave readable through brief concentrations of light. Between them, dark passages leave us to reconstruct the sea's volume. The image withholds the familiar daytime clues of colour, shoreline detail and glittering surface.
Its scale is difficult to settle. The waves establish distance, but the extensive blackness leaves very little against which to measure it. A print small enough to hold can suggest an ocean because so much of that ocean remains unseen. The granular marks also prevent the light from feeling like a neat contour drawn around each wave: it appears dispersed, unstable, caught in motion.
Escher's attachment to maritime life lasted well beyond this print. He travelled on cargo ships and wrote about the sea with an enthusiasm that the museum traces through his letters and reading. Here, however, the specific achievement is wonderfully modest. He had witnessed an unfamiliar kind of light and wanted to discover whether ink on paper could preserve it.
Dream: How To Assemble A Nightmare
The most disturbing thing about the mantis is how comfortably it occupies the picture. Its legs have convincing joints; its body has weight. The architecture is equally deliberate. Only their relationship is extraordinary: an insect towers over a recumbent religious figure, and the buildings appear stranded at the edge of an immeasurable darkness.
The ingredients can be traced. The cross-vaulted setting recalls the church of Santa Maria dell'Ospedale near Ravello, which Escher had already drawn and used in an earlier print. The tomb derives from one he saw beneath St Peter's in Rome. The mantis came from his studies of an actual insect. Both the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition catalogue notes and the Escher museum's detailed study explain this assembly of observed material. The finished wood engraving dates from April 1935.
The museum also reproduces Escher's later explanation of the work, in which he emphasised three-dimensional space and apparently endless depth. That is useful evidence against treating every detail as a coded psychological confession. The image invites interpretation, but the artist's stated concern gives us something firmer to examine: the diminishing structures, the abruptly ending ground and the vacant space beyond.
Even so, the pairing of a praying mantis with a tomb is hard to overlook. The insect's folded limbs echo the language of devotion, while its predatory form brings a very different association to the scene. This is a visual tension rather than a securely documented symbolic programme. The title leaves us with the uncertainty of a dream: we recognise almost everything in it, but cannot explain why these particular things have been brought together.
Wood engraving gives that uncertainty a persuasive surface. The vaults and the insect receive similarly exact attention. There is no blurred boundary at which the imagined world announces itself. We enter through detail and only afterwards notice that there is no sensible way out.
Hell: Escher In Bosch’s Company
The central creature in Hell seems to have been built from incompatible parts. Tree trunks serve as legs; boats support them; an opened body contains a scene that belongs inside a room. A human face looks out of this construction. It is a grotesque form of architecture, with people occupying something that is also alive.
The invention belongs to Hieronymus Bosch. Escher's November 1935 lithograph reproduces a section of the hell panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, centred on the figure commonly called the tree-man. Escher acknowledged the distinction on the print itself, crediting Bosch with the invention and himself with its execution. He had seen the painting in the Prado in 1922. The museum's account of his engagement with Bosch follows the connection from that visit to this much later lithograph.
There is a biographical coincidence worth handling carefully. Escher made the work after leaving Italy for Switzerland in 1935, during a period he later described with pronounced dislike for the mountain landscape and snow. The museum connects that unhappiness with his choice of subject. It is a suggestive reading, rather than proof that each horror in the print represents a private distress.
As a piece of printmaking, the lithograph offers a more direct question: what survives when Bosch's painted invention is translated into black, white and grey? The hollow body becomes especially stark. Our attention moves between its exterior outline and the activity inside, trying to understand whether we are looking at anatomy, a building or a stage set.
Beside Dream, the kinship is striking. Both pictures allow a body and an architectural space to interfere with one another. Escher's interest in impossible relationships did not develop in isolation; in Bosch he found an earlier artist who could make an irrational world look thoroughly furnished.
Encounter: A Handshake Built Into The Picture
At the back of Encounter, the figures have no room to move. Their silhouettes interlock across a flat wall, each shape occupying the space left by its neighbour. Further forward, they become bodies. Feet find a floor, limbs gain volume, and the two processions curve towards the foreground. The last pair meet with a handshake.
Escher identified them as an optimist and a pessimist. The optimist offers an open hand; the pessimist carries a warning finger. His explanation also gives a practical reason for the large hole in the floor: it keeps the patterned wall visible while obliging the figures to follow a circular route. The meeting has been engineered into the space. The museum reproduces that explanation alongside preparatory drawings, including a January 1944 tessellation. The lithograph followed in May.
It is worth tracing a single silhouette at the back before looking at the walking figures. A boundary there belongs to two neighbours at once. Once a figure steps forward, its contour becomes the edge of an individual body, separated from the surrounding space. Escher makes a change in pictorial logic feel like a change in a creature's circumstances.
The humour lies in how seriously everyone proceeds. These improbable little men obey the route laid out for them and eventually manage a civil greeting. The picture was made during the Second World War, a context in which the museum finds the gesture encouraging. That reading need not turn it into a fixed political allegory. Its human observation is sufficiently exact: two temperaments can remain different and still meet. The formal problem and the small social drama reach their resolution in the same pair of clasped hands.
Stars: Chameleons In A Geometrical Universe
There are two living occupants inside the central structure of Stars. Their toes curl around its bars; their tails help them grip. The framework is a compound of three interlocking octahedra, with the faces opened out so that we can see its edges and internal spaces. Smaller solids hover around it against the black background.
The chameleons were a practical choice within this extravagant invention. Escher explained that their feet and tails allowed them to hold on as the structure turned in space. The National Gallery of Victoria's notes on the October 1948 wood engraving record his explanation. Once noticed, the gripping limbs give the whole construction a physical credibility: these creatures appear to know how to inhabit it.
Escher's study of solid geometry involved books and models. His half-brother Berend's work on mineralogy and crystallography, and Max Brückner's illustrated study of polygons and polyhedra, supplied useful material. There was also an older artistic precedent for showing a solid through its edges. Leonardo da Vinci had drawn open frameworks for Luca Pacioli's Divina proportione, published in 1509. The Escher museum places these interests in context, including his construction of models for works such as Stars.
The composition rewards two different kinds of attention. You can follow the straight members and try to disentangle the octahedra, or watch the animals negotiate the result. Their irregular, textured bodies interrupt the clean geometry without concealing it. The space has no obvious floor or horizon, so the chameleons also supply a way to imagine orientation: wherever a foot can grip becomes a usable surface. An abstract object has acquired inhabitants, and with them a peculiar form of everyday life.
Puddle: A Woodland Walk And A Remembered Landscape
The muddy track is full of evidence that people have passed through. Tyres and shoes have pressed their marks into it. Nobody remains in view. Within the puddle, the trees and moon occupy a space that seems untouched by that traffic, although the water is lying in the same churned ground.
The idea appears in Escher's notes from 1951, during the years when he walked in the woods around Baarn after supper. He developed it into the colour woodcut of February 1952, printed from three blocks in black, green and brown. The museum's research also records a revealing early detail: the first small group of impressions carried a quotation associated with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Terre des hommes. Escher subsequently removed the words from the block. The image was left to make its connections without an explicit literary instruction.
The reflected trees have a history of their own. They recur from Pineta of Calvi, his Corsican woodcut of 1933. The apparent roadside observation therefore contains a remembered landscape made almost nineteen years earlier. This is an especially satisfying detail because the print already asks us to hold different places together: the ground at our feet and the sky above it.
The tracks help establish the downward view. Their diagonal movement and repeated impressions make the surface feel close enough to step onto. The trees pull our attention the other way, towards height. We can explain the reflection easily, yet the picture keeps making us perform that small reversal of direction.
Its restraint gives the discovery room. A few colours describe mud, reflected air and branches, while the irregular edge of the puddle cuts across the scene like an accidental frame. The grandeur of the view depends on an unpromising foreground. Someone walking briskly along the path might avoid the water and never see it.
Three Worlds: What A Pond Allows Us To See
The title gives a useful starting point, but counting the worlds is only the beginning. Leaves lie on the pond. Bare trees appear in reflection. Beneath both, a large fish swims through the water. Each is legible, although all three occupy overlapping areas of the sheet.
Escher made this lithograph in December 1955. The museum connects it with his woodland walks around Baarn, where ponds and other reflective surfaces supplied material for his prints. The setting is entirely plausible. Its complexity comes from attending to several things that an ordinary glance might register separately.
The leaves do essential work. Their pale shapes mark the actual surface and give the eye a measure of distance as they become smaller further away. The reflected trunks, by contrast, imply trees standing outside the image. The fish establishes a third position, within the water rather than upon it or above it. Its body can be read through the intervening marks, so the pond seems to admit depth at the very moment it is displaying a reflection.
This requires a different kind of patience from an impossible staircase. There is no point at which we discover that the construction cannot work. Instead, attention keeps changing its subject. Follow a branch and the water behaves as a mirror; look at a leaf and it becomes a surface; return to the fish and it becomes a transparent volume. The lithograph holds those readings together more steadily than a casual look at a real pond usually would.
After the suspended structures of Dream and the restless geometry of Stars, the stillness is striking. Escher has returned to the visible world with the same appetite for spatial complexity. The strangeness was available there all along, provided he looked long enough to draw it.
Returning To The Prints
A useful way to return to these prints is to follow one recurring problem through them. Consider shelter: the uneasy room in Poltergeist, the shaded cloister at Monreale, the exposed vault in Dream. Or consider how a surface changes its role: a patterned wall releases the figures of Encounter, while water in Three Worlds supports leaves, reflects trees and reveals a fish. The connections become more interesting as the individual works become more familiar.
Escher's precision is crucial to that experience. We believe the grain of a shadow, the weight of a column or the grip of a reptile before we question the larger arrangement. His craft gives us enough security to venture into increasingly unfamiliar territory.
Yet the beach at Scheveningen and the path through the woods remain as important as the invented universe. They bring us back to an artist willing to spend time with a difficult visual fact. A wave could glow. The moon could appear in mud. There was work to be done before either could become a picture.
Research notes: historical details and dates are linked to Escher in The Palace, the official M. C. Escher website and the National Gallery of Victoria. Descriptions of visual effects are editorial readings; they are distinguished from the artist’s documented explanations. Captions name the original works and media. The illustrations shown here are reproductions.