In 1937 he showed some early tessellations to his brother George (a geology professor), who suggested reading some crystallography papers. Setting aside the intimidating mathematics Escher immediately saw inspiring ideas in the illustrations. He became intensely focused on tessellations, completing 60 drawings by 1942 along with a thorough notebook of coherent theory he called “Regular division of the plane with asymmetric congruent polygons”. With this theory as a framework he made tessellation drawings steadily for the rest of his life. You can see 110 of them in this gallery, or follow links below to the 63 with single motifs.

Escher didn’t consider his drawings to be completed artworks, giving them only numbers and never titles. But they were a fertile source for other works — tessellations staged with other elements and beautifully rendered as lithographs and woodcuts, like his famous Day and Night and Reptiles.

Escher always wondered why nobody else was pursuing similar work. In a 1960 lecture to an overflow crowd he said “I can hardly believe that throughout the centuries no one has ever hit on the idea, that a plane-pattern might be made more significant and more fascinating by using as building components concrete, recognizable shapes borrowed from nature, such as fishes, birds, reptiles or human beings. But I do not give up hope of sometime meeting such a like-minded spirit; who knows, perhaps one of you may be able to help me! At all events, I urge you to please let me know if you should ever encounter such a plane-pattern, made up of recognizable elements.” (Schattschneider p.42)

Since then his brilliant “plane-patterns” themselves have inspired artists worldwide to create like-minded art, as well as captivating millions of viewers.    ... Show less

(The above is summarized from Doris Schattschneider’s fine book M.C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry.)