M.C. Escher: what a real print looks like, and what he carried home from Amsterdam

By Matthew Partsch

He failed his secondary school exams, never took a mathematics course past the age of eighteen, and spent the last thirty years of his life being quoted in geometry papers. The dorm-room poster is the least interesting thing about M.C. Escher — and the reason almost nobody at an estate sale knows what they are holding.

An architecture student who quit, at the right moment

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in Leeuwarden in 1898, the youngest son of a civil engineer, and by his own account was an indifferent student in almost every direction. He enrolled at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem intending to become an architect. Within days, the graphic arts instructor, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, looked at his drawings and told him he was in the wrong department. Escher switched to printmaking and stayed there for the next half century.

That teacher gave Escher the woodcut discipline that underwrites everything he later did — the patience for a medium in which every correction is a piece of wood you cannot put back.

In 1922 Escher went to Italy, and he stayed for thirteen years. The work from those years is the part of his career the general public has never seen: hill towns, coastlines, staircases in Calabrian villages, the Amalfi coast, cypresses. It is straight observational landscape printmaking, and it is very good. Collectors who only know the tessellations are routinely startled by the prices these command — a 1923 pen-and-ink of Siena set the record for an Escher work on paper at $91,940 at Bonhams in 2023, a record broken repeatedly two years later.

He left Italy in 1935, unwilling to raise his sons under Mussolini, and moved by way of Switzerland and Belgium back to the Netherlands. The landscape stopped almost immediately. What replaced it had been sitting in his sketchbook since a side trip in 1922 — but before that, there is a part of this story the poster captions never mention, and it is worth slowing down for.

What Escher carried home from Amsterdam

Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita was born in Amsterdam in 1868, into the city's Portuguese Jewish community. He was a serious artist in his own right — more than four hundred prints, a hard graphic style of stylized animals and birds in flat black and white, and a run of self-portraits that are among the best Dutch printmaking of the period. He was not a traveler. He worked for most of his career out of his own house on the Linnaeuskade in Watergraafsmeer, on the eastern edge of Amsterdam. As his student's reputation grew, his own quietly receded.

The two men stayed friends for more than twenty years after Haarlem. After the German invasion in 1940 de Mesquita, already in poor health, withdrew almost entirely and worked mostly in sketches. Escher kept visiting him, which by then was not a small thing to do. He also tried repeatedly to persuade his old teacher to go into hiding, and wrote letters asking for the family's release. De Mesquita would not go.

On the night of January 31, 1944, German troops took de Mesquita, his wife Elisabeth and their son Jaap from the house. Samuel and Elisabeth were killed at Auschwitz on or about February 11. Jaap died at Theresienstadt on March 20. None of them came back.

Escher traveled the thirty kilometers from Baarn at the end of February and found the house empty and looted, the studio in disarray, work scattered across the floor. He gathered up what he could — the museum in The Hague puts it at 136 impressions of 69 different prints — and carried them home. He came back the next day for the rest and was too late; a moving van was at the door and the house was being cleared under German supervision.

Among the sheets he picked up off the floor was one with the print of a German boot on it. He never had it cleaned or restored. He kept it with his own drawing supplies for the rest of his life.

In 1946, working with friends of Jaap's who had salvaged other pieces from the studio, Escher organized a memorial exhibition of de Mesquita's work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Speaking to the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1968 — twenty-four years afterward — he was still plainly unable to put it down, describing friends taken in the middle of the night and a man he believed could have been saved.

A substantial share of de Mesquita's surviving body of work exists because his student walked into a ransacked house and picked it up off the floor. That is the reason you can see a de Mesquita at the Met today, and it is worth knowing about a man usually filed under "optical illusions."

The Alhambra, twice

Escher visited the Alhambra in Granada in 1922 and again, at length, in 1936, copying the Moorish tilework by hand with his wife Jetta. Islamic religious convention kept the tiles abstract — interlocking stars, polygons, ribbons of color, no animals, no faces. Escher's contribution, and it is the whole of his originality, was to ask what happens if the interlocking shapes are lizards. Or fish. Or birds. Or a horseman.

The technical problem is severe and it is easy to underestimate. A shape that tiles the plane without gaps has to be constructed backwards from its edges, because every bump on one side must be an exactly matching hollow on the other. Making that shape also read as a recognizable animal — with a head at the right end and a foot that lands where a foot ought to — is a design constraint with almost no slack in it. Escher taught himself to do it by building his own classification system for the plane symmetries, in a notebook, without the vocabulary crystallographers had already developed for the same thing.

The impossible objects, and who invented what

The pieces that made him famous with the public are the architectural ones, and their history is a genuine two-way exchange rather than an artist borrowing from science.

Roger Penrose, then a young mathematician, saw Escher's 1953 lithograph Relativity at that Amsterdam exhibition and went home to devise, with his father Lionel, the tribar — the "Penrose triangle" — and the impossible staircase, published in 1958. Escher then read the Penroses' paper and used both devices: the staircase in Ascending and Descending in 1960, the tribar in Waterfall in 1961. An artist inspired a mathematician who formalized a figure that the artist then used more famously than its inventors ever did.

He died in 1972 at Hilversum, aged seventy-three, by which point his work had been adopted wholesale by a counterculture that he found faintly baffling. He turned down Mick Jagger's request for album art. He was, temperamentally, a meticulous Dutch craftsman who kept regular hours.

What "an Escher" actually means at an estate sale

This is where money is won and lost, and the distinction is unusually clean.

Escher was not a painter whose images were later reproduced as prints. The print was the work. Each impression was pulled from a woodblock, a lithographic stone, or a mezzotint plate, and in the great majority of cases he pulled it himself in his own studio. That is why the notation eigen druk appears in so many margins, and why it carries more weight than it would on a French or American print of the same era, where a professional atelier would have done the printing.

Editions were small and frequently open — he printed more when he needed more — which is why you will see the same title with a numbered edition on one sheet and no numbering on another. Both can be right.

What you are looking at	How to tell
An original impression	Ink sits on the paper with physical presence. Heavier stock, visible grain, no dot pattern anywhere under a loupe. Usually signed in pencil in the margin, often with eigen druk, sometimes numbered. Cited by Bool number.
A period book or magazine woodcut	Genuine relief printing, but issued in a book — the 1931 Emblemata series ran to about 300 and was unsigned as issued. Real, modest, and honestly cheap.
A licensed facsimile	Modern paper, often numbered out of 450 or similar, unsigned, dated decades after his death. Sold openly as a facsimile by reputable dealers. Not a fake — just not a print.
An offset poster	Smooth or glossy sheet, uniform flat ink, a rosette dot pattern under magnification, frequently a publisher's line printed in the lower margin. This is the overwhelming majority of what turns up.

• Get a loupe on the darkest area of ink. Continuous tone with a hard edge is printmaking. A regular grid of dots is a photomechanical reproduction, full stop, and no amount of framing changes it.
• Read the margin before the image. A pencil signature, a fraction, eigen druk, or a dedication in Dutch are all in his hand. A signature printed within the image area is part of the block and appears on every copy, including reproductions.
• Feel the sheet. His papers are substantial and often Dutch — Van Gelder, Hollande wove. Thin, bright, coated stock is a poster.
• Look for plate or block impression. Intaglio and mezzotint leave a physical platemark; relief printing leaves subtle debossing you can see in raking light from the back.
• Ask for the Bool number. Every catalogued work has one. A seller who has done the homework will supply it; one who cannot has usually not looked.

What the market is doing

Escher spent decades as the artist that serious print collectors were slightly embarrassed to like. That is over.

The 2022 centenary of his death, marked by a major retrospective, coincided with a run of high-value results — Reptiles reached the equivalent of roughly £460,000–£580,000 depending on which conversion you take, and prints of Ant, Bond of Union and Rind all cleared estimates by multiples. Then, in July 2025, Christie's sold the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. collection as a single-owner sale called The Art of Infinity: 65 lots, $7.8 million, with nearly every work on paper beating the previous record for the medium. The top lot, a preparatory pencil drawing for Reptiles, made $529,200 against a $150,000 high estimate. A 1953 wood engraving made $302,400 against an $18,000 high estimate.

Those numbers describe the top of a market with an unusually deep floor. Modest signed impressions of minor subjects, book woodcuts and unsigned Emblemata sheets still trade in the low hundreds, and they are real. That spread — four figures of separation between two things that both correctly say "M.C. Escher, original woodcut" — is the whole reason to learn the margin notations.

Why the work has lasted

The easy explanation is the trick — the staircase that climbs forever, the hands drawing each other. But tricks age badly, and this work has not.

What holds up is that Escher was answering a real question with real rigor and no institutional permission to do it. He had no mathematical training and did not pretend otherwise. He built a private system for dividing the plane, tested it against several hundred drawings, and arrived independently at conclusions crystallographers had reached with algebra. Then, when actual geometers showed up wanting to talk, he was straightforward about which parts he understood and which he had simply drawn his way into.

That is a craftsman's relationship to a hard problem, and it is why a shopkeeper's son with a woodblock ended up in the footnotes of papers on hyperbolic geometry. The posters were an accident. The patience was not.