'63 of the Knight's moves in chess covering each of the chessboard's squares in turn'
1980
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1980
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Dominant colour
'63 of the Knight's moves in chess covering each of the chessboard's squares in turn' is a 1980 by Jonathan Turner, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This print turns chess into art. It maps 63 knight moves that cover every square on the board exactly once. The design borrows from Euler’s 1770 “magic square,” a grid where rows, columns, and diagonals add up the same. Turner used a simple rule: each square on the chessboard got one move. No jumps were missed or repeated. The piece is more puzzle than painting—logic made visual. Next door, look up the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The print presents a portrait-oriented grid overlaid with colored lines, illustrating 63 sequential knight’s moves across a chessboard, covering every square once. It draws from a 1770 mathematical concept by Leonhard Euler, adapting his four-by-four magic square into a visual chessboard pattern. The artist constructed the design by guiding a line through each square using the knight’s right-angled movement, adhering strictly to the left-hand side. Produced with a stencil cutter at KELPRA studio, the work merges chess logic with graphic precision.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jonathan Turner mapped the invisible moves of a chess knight across every square on the board, printing each path in 1980.
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