Anna Ticho
1894–1980 · Israeli painter and draughtswoman of Moravian birth
Anna Ticho (Brno, Moravia, 1894 – Jerusalem, 1980) was an Israeli artist best known for her drawings and watercolours of the Jerusalem hills and her portraits of local people. Born when Moravia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she began studying drawing in Vienna at the age of fifteen.
In 1912 she moved with her mother to Jerusalem, then under Ottoman rule, where she married her first cousin, the ophthalmologist Avraham Albert Ticho, that same year. During the First World War the couple were exiled to Damascus, where Anna worked as a nurse; while recovering from typhus she returned to sketching landscapes. After the war they resettled in Jerusalem, where she assisted her husband in his eye clinic.
Early on, the harsh landscape and intense light of the Middle East made her work difficult, but in the 1930s she resumed drawing and painting and produced the series of hills and portraits for which she became known. Her works are held in museums around the world. Toward the end of her life she bequeathed the house, her art collection and her husband's Judaica collection to the Israel Museum; today Ticho House is a branch of that museum with a café and restaurant. In 1980 she received the Israel Prize for painting.