Circle Limit IV

1956–1960

The Penroses and “impossible figures”

“House of Stairs” (1951) attracted the interest of the mathematician Roger Penrose and his father, the biologist Lionel Penrose; in 1956 they published a paper on impossible objects and later sent Escher a copy. He replied, admiring their continuously rising flights of steps, and enclosed a print of “Ascending and Descending” (1960); he went on to use the Penrose triangle repeatedly, notably in “Waterfall” (1961).

1957–1959

Coxeter and “Circle Limit”

In 1957 the geometer Donald Coxeter, with Escher’s permission, used two of his drawings in a paper on crystal symmetry and sent him a copy; the figure of a hyperbolic tessellation, with tiles shrinking rapidly towards the edge of a circle, “gave him quite a shock” — here was a way to represent infinity on a plane. He called his experiments “Coxetering”; they gave the series of wood engravings “Circle Limit I–IV”, and in 1959 Coxeter concluded that they were accurate to the millimetre.

1958–1959

Books on tessellations and on his own graphic work

In 1958 came the book “Regelmatige vlakverdeling” (“Regular Division of the Plane”), on the systematic build-up of mathematical designs, and in 1959 “Grafiek en tekeningen” (“Graphics and Drawings”), in which Escher himself commented on 76 works. After reading it in 1959 Albert Flocon began a correspondence with the artist and wrote, with André Barre, the book “La Perspective curviligne”.

August – October 1960

Lectures on symmetry: Cambridge, Ottawa, MIT

In 1959 Escher met the chemist and crystallographer Caroline MacGillavry and at her invitation gave a lecture on symmetry at the international crystallographic conference in Cambridge in August 1960. On 29 August he sailed for Vancouver, and in October lectured in Ottawa and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

29 July 1961

Ernst Gombrich on Escher in the “Saturday Evening Post”

On 29 July 1961 the influential weekly “The Saturday Evening Post” printed a long article by Ernst Gombrich on Escher’s work.

1962–1964

Operations and cancelled lectures

In 1962 Escher underwent an urgent operation and spent a long time in hospital — a planned series of lectures in North America was cancelled and he stopped working for a time. In 1964 he went to Canada again to see his son and give lectures, but almost at once he had to have an operation in Toronto and returned to Europe; his health then declined, and by the late 1960s he needed constant care.