Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on June 17, 1898 in Leeuwarden (Friesland), the Netherlands. His father George Arnold Escher, who was a civil engineer, and his mother Sarah Gleichman Escher, had three sons of which Maurits was the youngest. The Escher family lived in Leeuwarden for the first 5 years of Maurits Cornelius life in a large house called ‘Princessehof’. 1.___________________________________________________ In 1903 the Escher family moved to Arnhem where Maurits took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen. From 1912 until 1918, Maurits Cornelius Escher attended secondary school. 2._______________

___________________________________________ He never succeeded in his final exam, so M.C. has never officially graduated. Later he started studying at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. After three years, Maurits decided he had gained enough experience in drawing and woodcutting and left the school.

Escher traveled to Italy regularly in the following years, and it was in Italy that he first met Jetta Umiker, the woman who would become his wife in 1924. 3._____________________________ When the political climate under Mussolini became unbearable, the family moved to Chateau-d’Oex , Switzerland, where they stayed for two years. 4.__________________________________________So two years later, in 1937, the family moved again, this time to Ukkel, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. World War 2 forced them to move a last time in January 1941, this time to Baarn, the Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970. Most of Eschers better known pictures date from this period. 5. ______________________________. Only in 1962, when he had to undergo surgery, there was a time when no new images were created. Escher moved to the Rosa-Spier house in Laren in the northern Netherlands in 1970, a retirement home for artists where he could have a studio of his own. He died there on March 27, 1972.

Escher and Umiker had three sons.

Well known example of his work include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown drawing each other, Sky and Water, in which plays on light and shadow convert fish in water into birds in the sky, and Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective.

Esher’s works has a strong mathematical component, and many of the worlds which he drew are built around impossible objects such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle.

6._________________________________________________________________

For example, in Gravity, multi-colored turtles poke their heads out of a stellated dodecahedron. His work has been referenced in the 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning

book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

I. I. Match the words (1–4) with their definitions/explanations (a–d):

II. Choose from (a–g) the one which best fits each of (1–6). There is one choice you do not need to use.

a. Escher’s artwork is well-liked by scientists, especially mathematicians who enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric distortions.

b. Escher, however, who had been very fond of and inspired by the landscape in Italy, was decidedly unhappy in Switzerland.

c. This house would later be turned into a museum to host work from M.C. Escher.

d. Though he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor.

e. The young couple settled down in Rome after marriage and stayed there until 1935

f. Sometimes the cloudy, cold wet weather of the Netherlands allowed him to focus entirely on his works.

g. He was not interested in Mathematics.

III. In pairs, find and then say what events the following years refer to: