C. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals. .
.
He was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. After 5 years the family moved to Arnhem where Escher spent most of his youth. After failing his high school exams, Escher ultimately was enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem .
After only one week, he informed his father that he would rather study graphic art instead of architecture, as he had shown his drawings and linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who encouraged him to continue with graphic arts. .
.
After finishing school, he traveled extensively throughout Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. They settled in Rome, where they stayed until 1935. During these years, Escher would travel each year throughout Italy, drawing and sketching for the various prints he would make when he returned home. .
Many of these sketches he would later use for various other lithographs and/or woodcuts and wood engravings, for example the background in the lithograph Waterfall stems from his Italian period, or the trees reflecting in the woodcut Puddle, which are the same trees Escher used in his woodcut Pineta of Calvi, which he made in 1932.
.
M.C. Escher became fascinated by the regular Division of the Plane, when he first visited the Alhambra, a fourteen century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain in 1922. .
During the years in Switzerland and throughout the World War II, he vigorously pursued his hobby, by drawing 62 of the total of 137 Regular Division Drawings he would make in his lifetime. He would extend his passion for the Regular Division of the Plane, by using some of his drawings as the basis for yet another hobby, carving beech wood spheres. .
In Metamorphosis, a series of prints made in 1937, we find vague, abstract shapes changing into sharply defined concrete forms, and then changing back again.
