Hatikvah Music Box.

£800 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Wooden music box playing 'Hatikvah' with Szyk's colour lithograph titled 'The visual history of Israel', from the 'Visual history of nations' series, to its front. The series of nine works dating from 1945 to 1949 was commissioned by Kasimir Bileski (1908-2005), a Canadian philatelist and entrepreneur. The series was originally called the 'United Nations series', because each of the nine prints portrays the visual history of a founding or member country of the United Nations. The other nations included in the series were the United States of America, Canada, Poland, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China and Switzerland. The lithographs were intended to be used as title pages for a unique international stamp album and were printed from watercolour and gouache illuminations. Hatikvah (meaning 'the hope') is the national anthem of the State of Israel. It is based on a 1878 poem by Naftali Herz Imber and a 1888 melody by Samuel Cohen. Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), a Polish-Jewish artist, produced works characterised in their material content by social and political commitment, and in their formal aspect by the rejection of modernism and drawing on the traditions of medieval and renaissance painting, especially illuminated manuscripts from those periods. Szyk worked primarily as a book illustrator and political artist throughout his career and always showed great attention to the colour effects and details in his works. Szyk's drawings and paintings became even more politicall

• Binding: Hardcover

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