MC Escher’s otherworldly pictures are instantly recognisable. You’ll have seen them countless times, even if you don’t know his name. For over half a century his dreamscapes have adorned the walls of student bedsits. He’s revered by everyone from spaced-out hippies to sci-fi nerds, yet he’s never been taken terribly seriously by the art establishment.

When Mick Jagger wrote to him, asking if the Rolling Stones could use one of his pictures as an album cover, Escher turned him down. He’d never heard of the Stones

Remarkably, there’s only one Escher in a British collection. Incredibly, this fine show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh, is the first major retrospective ever mounted in the UK. "Everyone knows the images but no one knows about him," says Patrick Elliott, the gallery’s chief curator.

There are several reasons for this neglect. Escher was a printmaker, working mainly with woodcuts and lithographs. In grander galleries, printmaking has traditionally been (wrongly) regarded as a poor relation to painting.

Escher was a superb draughtsman, at a time when technical expertise became unfashionable. He was populist and timeless – trendy art critics preferred to praise the obscure and opaque. But though the cognoscenti ignored him, his fans adored him. Only now is the art world starting to catch up.

To be fair, one reason why Escher never became as famous as his artworks was because Escher wanted it that way. He liked to live a quiet life - he didn’t court publicity. He wasn’t interested in celebrity – his only concern was his work. When success started intruding on his time, he put up his prices to try and dampen demand. It had the opposite effect.

Escher was mystified by his cult status as a counter-cultural artist. He didn’t share the values of the beatniks who admired him. Like a lot of truly creative men, he enjoyed a conventional, bourgeois lifestyle.