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Born in Brno, Moravia (now the Czech Republic) in 1894, renowned Jerusalem landscape artist Anna Ticho's relationship with Jerusalem, her adopted home, blossomed when she was already a young adult. The same can not be said about her relationship with her cousin, Dr. Abraham Albert Ticho, whom she followed from Europe to pre-state Israel in 1912 and married shortly after when she was 18 and he was 29.

Having grown accustomed to the well-equipped surroundings of the Vienna art schools where she had studied in her teens, in Jerusalem, Ticho found herself temporarily paintless - and historians to this day debate whether she found the Jerusalem hills to be barren and uninspiring, or if she was so moved by the landscape that she could not immediately express herself.

In any case, Ticho soon got to work, and Jerusalem residents grew accustomed to seeing her head out in the morning from her spacious Ottoman home on Rav Kook Street (which today houses a landmark dairy restaurant bearing her name as well as a branch of the Israel Museum dedicated to Ticho and her drawings and paintings), towards the Old City, where she would spend the day painting the surrounding hills.

This approach to rendering Jerusalem's landscapes - based strictly on observation, and with a focus on a variety of vistas - marked a new direction for art created in, and focused on, the Holy City, which, in Ticho's time, was primarily depicted with the orientalist school's eye for romanticism and focus on iconic pilgrimage sites.

The sweeping hill-scapes of western Judea, and the flora adorning the slopes, received much attention from Ticho's creative energies. As she once wrote to a friend:

I came to Jerusalem when it was still "virgin territory," with vast, breathtakingly beautiful vistas.... I was impressed by the grandeur of the scenery, the bare hills, the large, ancient olives trees, and the cleft slopes ...the sense of solitude and eternity.

Ticho's paintings of Jerusalem landscapes, and eventually its architecture and people, capture the artist's love of her adopted city in pen and ink, charcoal and, later, paint and pastels. This new, eastern world was dramatically different from the European life she had left behind, and it's possible that the act of pouring her energies into her art allowed Ticho to navigate this new, pioneering existence. During these earlier years of her career, her works were shown extensively across North America, Europe and Israel's cultural centers, and in Jerusalem, she contributed to the Tower of David's first-ever exhibition of works by local talent.

After her husband's death in 1960, Ticho stopped painting from nature and began painting from memory and inner vision. Her work became more abstract, and and washes of soft colors replaced the definition of the black lines of her earlier drawings. To this day, the entire canon of her artwork remains one of Jerusalem's artistic treasures.

Ticho's love of Jerusalem is reciprocated by the city, which awarded her with the Yakir Yerushalayim Award (Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem) in 1970. Ticho was also awarded the Israel Prize for painting in 1980, shortly before her death that same year. The city Ticho loved had changed dramatically over the course of her lifetime, passing from Ottoman hands to British, before finally becoming the modern capital of the Jewish state.

In her will, Ticho left her home, now known as the Ticho House - which served as both her studio and her husband's eye clinic, where Anna worked as an assistant - to the Israel Museum to be used as an exhibition space and for cultural events. Ticho's own venerable paintings, and her husband's Judaica collection, make up the lion's share of the permanent exhibit on display there.

Images of Anna Ticho as a young lady, Anna and Dr. Abraham Albert Ticho in their Kook St. home's courtyard and Ticho's "Bougainvillea" (detail), all courtesy of the Israel Museum.