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 politically engaged when Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. Szyk started drawing Führer's caricatures as early as 1933; probably, the first work of the artist directed against the leader of the Third Reich was a drawing of Hitler, made in pencil, in which he was shown as a new pharaoh. These drawings anticipated the present great series of Szyk's arts – Haggadah, his magnum opus. Szyk illustrated it in 48 drawings in the years 1932-1938, moving to London in 1937 to supervise its publication.

In July 1940 Szyk moved to North America, with the support of the British government and the Polish government-in-exile, on assignment to popularise the struggle of the British and Polish nations against Nazism. He ended up settling in New Canaan, Connecticut, and in subsequent years illustrated a number of works on Jewish themes, such as 'Pathways through the Bible' by Mortimer J. Cohen (1946), 'The Book of Job' (1946), 'The Book of Ruth' (1947), 'The Ten Commandments' (1947), 'The Story of Joseph and his Brother's (1949) and others.

Music box to be hanged on the wall with a colour lithograph print by Szyk to its front; box size: 32 x 27 x 9 cm; string-pull mechanism and music playback in perfect working order; minor imperfections to the wooden panels.