Yet, as Patrick Elliott of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art points out, even the print of Day and Night in the collection of the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery “was actually acquired by the Geography Department and was transferred to the Museum at a later date”.

So who was Escher – and does he deserve the indifferent reputation as a fine artist that fate has dealt him? These are some of the questions posed by The Amazing World of MC Escher, a forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which also happens to be the artist’s first major UK retrospective.

‘Miserable memories’

Born in the small city of Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands, Maurits Cornelis Escher, who was always known in his family as “Mauk”, grew up in a prosperous household as the fifth son of a civil engineer who was a senior official at the Department of Public Works.

At secondary school in the city of Arnhem, where his family had moved in 1903, he had an unhappy time – and his miserable memories of this period of his life had a decisive influence upon many of his later prints, including Relativity.

Indeed, decades after “the hell that was Arnhem”, as Escher later described his schooldays, he made a number of works featuring versions of the institution’s dramatic staircase, which he had ascended so frequently as a boy. The resemblance between the school’s staircase in reality and the structures in Escher’s prints is remarkable.

In 1919, Escher enrolled at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. His father hoped that he would become an architect, but, influenced by his graphic arts teacher, who had spotted his talent as a printmaker, Escher was determined to become an artist. As an adult, he pursued this career – combining travel, when he sketched and came up with ideas for future works (his two visits to the Moorish palace of the Alhambra in Granada were especially important, since they taught him how to work with tessellating patterns), with long stints at home, where he led a remarkably orderly life.

“He had a severe daily routine mixing working and walking and meeting visitors,” says Micky Piller, curator of Escher in Het Paleis, the museum devoted to the artist’s works in The Hague, where selections are shown from the collection of the Gemeentemuseum, which has also loaned works to the exhibition in Edinburgh. “He liked to observe nature, the sky, and birds. He loved classical music, especially Bach.”

A ‘one-man art movement’

Despite his self-discipline, however, Escher only became able to support himself solely from art during his late fifties. By then he had discovered his principal theme of perspective-mangling worlds, familiar from works such as Belvedere (1958), Ascending and Descending (1960), and Waterfall (1961), as well as Relativity. He was also known for executing his prints to a very high level.