M. C. Escher
Staircases that return to their own beginning, drawn with a printmaker's patience rather than a mathematician's.
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born at Leeuwarden in 1898, trained in graphic art at Haarlem, and spent formative years in Italy drawing landscape and architecture before political conditions drove him north in 1935. A second visit to the Alhambra in 1936 and its tiled walls set him on the work he is known for: regular divisions of the plane in which fish become birds, and the impossible constructions — Relativity, Ascending and Descending, Waterfall, Drawing Hands. He had no mathematical training and always said so, corresponding with Penrose and Coxeter as an interested amateur. He died in 1972.
This is entirely a print market, and technique is the first thing to establish: Escher worked in woodcut, wood engraving, lithography and mezzotint, and the mezzotints in particular are scarce. Most of his prints are not numbered in the modern sense, so identification depends on the Bool catalogue number, the signature and inscription in pencil, and the paper. Posthumous restrikes and a great many photomechanical reproductions circulate and are frequently offered as originals. Condition is decisive — foxing, light-staining and trimmed margins are common in sheets that have hung for decades.
If you own a work by M. C. Escher
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.