Arnold Daghani was born in Bukovina, Romania in 1909 into a Jewish family. In the 1920s he travelled to Germany and France and took art lessons in Munich. In 1942 the Daghanis were interned in a concentration camp in the Ukraine. As a direct consequence of being an artist an opportunity to escape presented itself in July 1943, some five months before the inmates of the camp were exterminated. They lived in Israel and several European countries before finally settling in England in 1977. From 1960, Daghani was able to devote himself full-time to his art. Daghani has become well known in his native Romania and major collections of his work are to be found in the National Gallery, Romania, the Museum of Modern Art, Bucharest, and at the University of Sussex as part of a special collection of German-Jewish Studies.