Dora Holzhander was born in Paris in 1928 to Polish Jewish parents who emigrated to London in the 1930s. In her early twenties she embarked on a successful artistic career, commencing with a showing in 1949 at the RBA 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition and continuing until her death in 2015.

Writer and art critic Philip Vann, a long-term friend who authored a monograph on her life and work in 1997, describes Dora's art as: 'rooted in a mystical perception of reality, her pictures are non-academic in perspective and depict the timeless Jewish world, her own childhood in Paris and London, and more general celebrations of humanity: lovers embracing, motherhood, religious contemplation. Sparkling with innocent humour, her paintings draw no distinction between the sacred and mundane.'