Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.

Early in his career he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he reused as details in his artworks. He travelled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and La Mezquita, Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.

His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher considered that he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Harold Coxeter; read mathematical papers by these authors and by the crystallographer Friedrich Haag; and conducted his own original research into tessellation.