Shop Online
	Posters T-Shirts Puzzles Silk Ties Silk Bow Ties Books Calendars Stationery Magnets Bookmarks Miscellaneous
	What's New Gift Items Sale Items Clearance Items Send an E-Card

Customer Comments
	excellent condition... prompt and polite business

Bookmark Us

Newsletter
	Sign up for our low volume newsletter. We give away a poster every month.

by Tom Litchfield

In 1918, Mauk, as Maurice Cornelis Escher was known to his friends, was finishing up his fifth and final year of school. At that time he and his parents decided it was time to consider what Escher would do for work in the real world. They came to an agreement that architecture would be suitable. His mother discussed this with a professor in Amsterdam who recommended the Higher Technical School in Delft, instead of the Royal Academy of Art which Escher preferred to attend. This plan of action was upset when Escher failed his final exams in history, constitutional organization, political economy, and book-keeping. Escher's father noted in his diary that Mauk drew and created a linocut of a sunflower to comfort himself.

During this time there was a government rule that boys of conscription age who had failed their final exam only had to retake the subjects in which they had failed. So Escher, who had a deferment of military service, could enlist in 1919 and, during the rest of 1918 and part of 1919, take some private lessons and begin studies in Delft.

The Rector of the Higher Technical School agreed to the plan, Escher went to lectures and became a member of the student body. Due in large part to an unmanageable skin infection, Escher fell far behind in his studies. So far in fact that he wrote to a friend, Roosje Ingen Housz, in January of 1919 that he wasn't even trying to catch up and would concentrate on technical and non-technical drawings.

He wrote to her again in February about a conversation with a Professor R.N. Roland Holst, "He strongly advised me to do some woodcuts, and I immediately followed his advice, with the enclosed result. Large blocks of wood are too expensive and small ones are really only suitable for bookplates. I was therefore forced to make a bookplate. I send it to you, even though it isn't particularly good - but it is my first woodcut. It is wonderful work but far more difficult than working with linoleum, because this end-grain palmwood is terribly hard." Five days later she received thirty prints from this wood-cut of a rose, with her initials at the bottom. This first effort at woodcutting can be found in M.C. Escher His life and Complete Graphic Work, as catalog number 27, dated March 1919, size 52 x 33 cm, 2 x 1.25 inches.

So began his passion with wood-cutting and wood engraving.

For the reader's information, in a wood-cut the artist uses the side grain of the wood and in a wood engraving the artist uses the end-grain. Escher used both techniques and favored wood-engraving when very small detail was necessary, as in the wood-cut/wood-engraving Smaller and Smaller which is a combination of both techniques.

Tom Litchfield