Day and Night

4 July 1935 – August 1937

Leaving Fascist Italy: Château-d’Œx

On 4 July 1935 the Eschers left Italy: the political climate under Mussolini had become unacceptable to the artist, their nine-year-old son’s health had worsened and at school George was being made to wear the uniform of the Balilla organisation; they had to sell the house in Rome, and the family moved to Château-d’Œx in Switzerland. Life there was more expensive and they had to work hard: Jetta took up the piano again, Escher joined a chess club and tried landscapes, but was disappointed — they lacked the warmth of the Italian ones; in the summer of 1935 he went to The Hague to see his parents and drew one of his best-known portraits of his father.

1936

A voyage with the Adria line and a second Alhambra

In early 1936 Escher proposed to the Adria shipping company free passage in return for drawings of their ships and ports — to his surprise the company agreed — and from May, with Jetta, he sailed along the Italian coast and then to Spain, where he revisited the Alhambra and spent days at a time drawing its mosaic patterns in detail: tessellation then fascinated him to the point of obsession. The voyage, which ended with their return to Château-d’Œx by 1 September, was his last long study journey; he called it the richest source of inspiration he had ever tapped.

1937

1937: from nature to geometry

1937 was a year of transition: Escher exchanged landscape for works embodying geometric constructions and thereafter made his works in the studio rather than in the field — his art changed from observational to the product of geometric analysis and visual imagination. His first picture of an impossible reality, “Still Life and Street”, dates from late 1936 or 1937, and “Metamorphosis I” (1937) began a series of designs that told a story through pictures.

from 1937

Papers by Pólya and Haag, and the 17 symmetry groups

Escher began to study mathematics from papers by George Pólya and the crystallographer Friedrich Haag on plane symmetry groups, sent to him by his brother Berend. He carefully studied the 17 canonical wallpaper groups, created periodic tilings in 43 drawings of different types of symmetry and, from 1937, made woodcuts based on those groups, using his own notation.

1937

Moving to Uccle near Brussels

In August 1937 the family, which had never got used to the atmosphere of rural Switzerland, moved to Uccle, a suburb of Brussels. In 1938 the Eschers had a third son, Jan.

14 June 1939 – 27 May 1940

The deaths of his father and mother

On 14 June 1939 Escher’s father, George Arnold, died in The Hague at the age of 96; on 27 May 1940 his mother, Sara Gleichman, died too. Brussels was by then occupied by Nazi Germany and Escher could not attend his mother’s funeral; for the rest of the year he settled her financial affairs and carried out a commission from Leiden’s town hall to decorate the building.