ESCHER TILES

Some artists became involved with tiles almost by accident like the famous Dutch printmaker Maurits Escher (1898-1972) who became fascinated by tiles when he made a trip to Spain in 1922 where he saw Moorish mosaic tiles in the Alhambra.  He began to study their principles of tessellation, and used it as the foundation for his own work. He wrote “The Moors were masters in the filling of surface with congruent figures and left no gaps. In the Alhambra, in Spain, especially, they decorated the walls by placing congruent multi-coloured pieces of majolica together without interstices.”  In the 1950s and 60s Escher made designs for tiled columns for the entrance halls of two schools in The Hague in 1959-60 and for another in Baarn in1968. They show black-and-white alternating images of fish, birds, reptiles and flowers made by the firm De Porceleyne Fles in Delft and add a touch of visual interest to the modern entrances of these schools.