Emili Grau Sala was the son of a cartoonist who specialised in caricatures, Joan Grau Miró, creator of the Saló d’Humoristes in Barcelona. The painter lived for many years in France, moving between Paris, Honfleur and Deauville, where he enjoyed great success thanks to his luminous and cheerful painting, successor of post-impressionism. In his repertoire, he specialised in book illustration and the production of etchings using xylography and lithography. He worked as an illustrator with the Russian ballets of Monte-Carlo, the company of Margarita Xirgu, and on literary magazines in editions of authors such as Flaubert, Baudelaire and Maupassant. From the 30s onwards, he worked as a poster designer, costume designer and decorator for different performing arts works. His post-impressionist compositions are very colourful, there are indoor and outdoor figurative scenes, or, as in this case, the illustration depicting Scheherazade, the main character and narrator of the collection of stories in Farsi entitled The Thousand and One Nights.