The Dutch printmaker who made stairs climb forever, hands draw themselves, and separate worlds share the same room. His woodcuts and lithographs turn perspective, reflection and repeating patterns into visual stories.
Meet the artist at Escher in The Palace ↗Open each museum link to see Escher’s original print alongside its history.
Three directions of gravity share one building. Each person's world makes sense on its own; together, the stairs connect incompatible floors and walls. Escher made both lithograph and woodcut versions in his exploration of multiple viewpoints.
Follow one person along a staircase, then follow the person beside them.
View original & museum story ↗A pavilion's upper and lower storeys look plausible separately, but its columns connect them impossibly. The seated figure holds an impossible cube, a small clue to the larger architectural trick.
Trace each column from its foot to its top, then inspect the ladder.
View original & museum story ↗Two processions circle a rooftop stairway without ever gaining or losing height. The Penroses' 1958 paper on impossible objects sparked the print; Escher sent them an impression with his thanks in April 1960.
Walk around the staircase with your eyes. Where should the height difference go?
View original & museum story ↗An aqueduct seems to carry water downhill, yet delivers it above the wheel where it began. Escher builds a perpetual-motion fantasy by joining plausible local views into an impossible circuit.
Follow the water instead of the towers. Does its apparent slope agree with its destination?
View original & museum story ↗A cube-shaped room opens onto a lunar landscape through three incompatible perspectives. Its repeated bird-headed figure is based on a Persian simurgh statuette Escher received as a wedding gift in 1924.
Decide which surface is the floor. Now look through another opening.
View original & museum story ↗Two convincing hands emerge from a flat sheet and draw each other's sleeves. Escher used his own right hand as a model, turning a study of the hand into a loop with no first creator.
Notice where the flat sleeve becomes a solid wrist.
View original & museum story ↗A visitor examines a print of Senglea, Malta, whose buildings expand to include the gallery and the visitor himself. Escher worked out the swirling transformation intuitively, leaving its centre blank; mathematicians later studied and completed that gap.
Start with the visitor, then follow the town around the picture.
View original & museum story ↗A lizard leaves a tessellated drawing, crawls over objects on the desk, then becomes part of the flat pattern again. Escher turns a repeating design into a story about crossing between two and three dimensions.
Find both places where the animal changes from pattern to creature.
View original & museum story ↗Fields become interlocking black and white birds flying through opposing landscapes of day and night. Tessellation provides the bridge from repeating flat shapes to a recognisable landscape.
Watch the fields at the centre turn into the bodies of birds.
View original & museum story ↗Birds and fish fit together in the centre. As the pattern opens up, the spaces between fish become sky and the spaces between birds become water. Escher makes figure and background exchange roles.
Look at the white shapes first, then the black ones.
View original & museum story ↗Letters, reptiles, insects, birds and buildings change into one another across a print almost four metres long. Atrani, a town Escher visited on Italy's Amalfi Coast, becomes part of a cycle that returns to its opening word.
Follow the strip all the way to the chessboard and back to the lettering.
View original & museum story ↗The mirrored ball reveals Escher and his studio on Via Alessandro Poerio in Rome. A convex reflection enlarges nearby objects and compresses the surrounding room, bringing the artist and his world into a single curved image.
Compare the hand outside the sphere with the room reflected inside it.
View original & museum story ↗Modern diagrams in our image collection. These illustrate the ideas; they are separate from Escher’s original prints.
A familiar cube frame acquires an impossible set of overlaps.
A staircase that climbs forever and gets nowhere.
Escher’s original prints are linked to museum pages. The M. C. Escher Company requires permission for website reproductions, so the originals are not offered as downloads here.
Portrait: Attributed to Hans Peters / Anefo, 1971. Nationaal Archief, Netherlands. Source & attribution · CC0 1.0. Locally stored, unchanged photograph.
Step into impossible worlds in games →M. C. Escher was a Dutch printmaker whose work explored impossible spaces, reflection, repeating patterns and relationships between different worlds. His prints combine careful drawing with surprising geometric ideas.
The guide covers twelve famous prints, including Relativity, Belvedere, Ascending and Descending, Waterfall and Drawing Hands. Each entry links to a museum source for the original work and its history.
No. The original prints are linked to museum pages. Modern explanatory diagrams in the archive are identified separately, and Escher’s portrait has its own image credit and license.