Circle Limit III
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Circle Limit III is a woodcut made in 1959 by Dutch artist M. C. Escher, in which "strings of fish shoot up like rockets from infinitely far away" and then "fall back again whence they came".
Circle Limit III, 1959
M. C. Escher
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Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics.
Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.
Escher's birth house, now part of the Princessehof Ceramics Museum, in Leeuwarden, Friesland, the Netherlands
Moorish tessellations including this one at the Alhambra inspired Escher's work with tilings of the plane. He made sketches of this and other Alhambra patterns in 1936.
Escher's painstaking study of the same Moorish tiling in the Alhambra, 1936, demonstrates his growing interest in tessellation.