Portrait of the Artist's Wife, with the Dome of the Rock in the Background

The painter and decorative artist Ze’ev Raban (originally Wolf Rawicki) was born in Łódź, where he initially studied art; he continued his training in Munich and Brussels, where the influence of art nouveau was then at its zenith. He settled in Jerusalem in 1912 and joined the faculty of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts; most of the objects produced in its workshops between 1914 and 1929 were of his design. His style combined elements of art nouveau with motifs from traditional Syrian and Persian art. In addition to his striking and erotically charged art-nouveau works on biblical themes in a Jewish secular-national and Zionist vein, Raban also created the decorative elements for such well-known Jerusalem buildings as the King David Hotel and the YMCA, and designed a wide variety of everyday objects, including playing cards, banknotes, tourism posters, jewelry, commercial packaging, and Zionist insignia.