Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.This little-known museum in Leeuwarden, the quiet capital of the Dutch province of Friesland, has a tripartite claim to fame — as a royal residence, the birthplace of artist MC Escher, and the home of an important ceramics collection. In 1709, the town welcomed Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel as the wife of Johan Willem Friso, Prince of Orange-Nassau. But when he died just two years later, the German princess was thrust into the role of regent to her young son, for nearly 20 years. When her son reached maturity in 1731, Marie Louise acquired the Princessehof.She was a popular ruler, known familiarly as “Marijke Meu” — or Aunt Mary. Through her children, Willem and Amalia, she is the ancestor of all of Europe’s crowned heads of state today, from Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, to the UK’s King Charles III.As palaces go, the Princessehof is relatively modest, its neoclassical features reflecting Marie Louise’s unshowy Protestant culture. The entrance hall and state room retain original carved beams and recently restored paintwork. Only the dining room overlooking the garden — with its Baroque gilded leather wallpaper and a marble fireplace surmounted by an elaborate mirror — nods to the opulence usually associated with royals. Later it was partitioned into three dwellings, one of which was rented by George Arnold Escher, a civil engineer, in the 1890s. His fifth son, Maurits Cornelis, would become famous for his woodcuts and lithographs exploring infinity and symmetry, his optical illusions and “impossible constructions”. But Escher received scant recognition in his home town. A permanent exhibition, At Home with MC Escher, includes reviews in the local paper of an early show, held here in 1929. During its six-day run, there were only 12 recorded visitors and no sales, despite the report’s insistence that he “excel[led] in his field” and had “a penchant for the romantic, for the miraculous”. Among the woodcuts inspired by the artist’s travels in Italy and executed in a Surrealist style, Kris Callens, director of the museum, singles out “Castle in the Air” (1928) as a “key work” in Escher’s development towards the visual conundrums that became his trademark. “If only this museum had kept the prints that were displayed here and had built a good personal connection with Escher, it would have been his national museum.” Under Callens’s direction, the Princessehof has been making more of Escher. One display is dedicated to the influence he drew from Moorish architecture; another contains an anamorphic projection of “Convex and Concave” (1955) on to a vaulted ceiling, by the Dutch street artist Leon Keer. In 1917, Nanne Ottema, a local notary, established the ceramics museum. It holds more than 35,000 pieces from around the world, with items ranging from 2800BC up to the 21st century, and an impressive collection of 17th and 18th-century ceramics made in south-east Asia for export to Europe.Currently on show is Wu Zetian: the Only Female Emperor of China, with more than 100 artefacts on loan from China and rarely seen in Europe, including earthenware, porcelain, jewellery and gold and silver vessels. One of the most powerful women in the country’s history, Wu Zetian took over from her husband aged 67, after her ascent from concubine to wife to joint “emperor”. After being neglected or dismissed by generations of male scholars in China, Wu is at last becoming “accepted and maybe even celebrated”, says Denise Campbell, curator of Asian ceramics. “Her voice was taken away for so many centuries, and this was our way of honouring her.” Marie Louise, another accidental female leader with an unusual amount of political clout for her time, would surely have approved.princessehof.nlFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
