The Owl That Watches

Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita was a Dutch Jewish graphic artist who taught at the Amsterdam School of Applied Arts for three decades. His students included M.C. Escher, who later described him as the most important influence on his early work. De Mesquita made woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs — images of animals, people, and the strange territory between them.

The owl in the Rijksmuseum collection, dated 1915, is one of his most direct works. There is no background. No setting. Just the bird, rendered in bold black lines on white paper, staring forward with the particular intensity that owls have — that quality of attention that makes you feel observed even when you know you are the one doing the looking.

De Mesquita was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and did not survive. His work was saved largely because Escher returned to his teacher's studio after the war and gathered what remained. The Rijksmuseum holds a significant portion of that archive, and in 2019 made much of it available through their open-access programme.

We found the owl there. It seemed important to put it somewhere it could be seen — not behind glass, not in a database, but out in the world, on a body, moving through a city. De Mesquita made images of things that watch. We thought they should keep watching.