Antonietta Raphaël was born into a Jewish family in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1895, fleeing to London in 1905 to escape the growing anti-Semitism. Raphaël graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, while also taking evening art classes and revolving in Jewish artistic and literary circles. Leaving London in 1919, she spent her life between France and Italy, working as a painter and sculptor, co-founding, with her artist husband Mario Mafai and fellow painter Gino Bonichi the so-called 'Scuola Romana'.
Sculptor and painter Antonietta Raphaël was born into a Jewish family in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1895, the only daughter and last of the fourteen children of Rabbi Simon Raphaël and his wife Katia Horowitz. Following her father’s death, the family’s precarious finances and growing anti-Semitism, she fled to London with her mother in 1905, where they were reunited with her brothers, who had already established themselves as tailors in the Jewish quarter in the East End. Known in England as Annetta Raphael, she earned her living as a dressmaker, also teaching piano and violin and attending the Royal Academy of Music part-time; after graduating, she also taught solfège (aural skills, pitch and sight-reading) in the East End. A frequent visitor to the British Museum, Raphael became fascinated by Egyptian sculpture, taking evening art classes and making her first drawings around 1918. She also mixed in artistic and literary Jewish circles, which included immigrant sculptors Jacob Epstein and Ossip Zadkine; she was particularly close to her neighbour, 'Whitechapel Boy' painter-poet Isaac Rosenberg, with whom she may have had a youthful love affair around 1913.
In 1919, following the death of her mother, she left London, travelling first to Paris, where she remained until 1924, and eventually settling in Rome a year later (where she became known as Antonietta Raphael). She entered the Roman Academy of Fine Arts in 1925, meeting the Italian painter Mario Mafai (1902–1965), with whom she started a lifelong relationship (they married in 1935). At that time, Mafai shared his studio in Via Cavour with the painter, Gino Bonichi, known as ‘Scipione’, and the three artists soon formed a group, which the prominent art critic Roberto Longhi referred to as the ‘School of Via Cavour’, characterised by the bright palette and warm tones which would later define the so-called Scuola Romana (School of Rome), which Raphaël also co-founded. Drawing on memories of her Jewish heritage, her painting was Expressionistic in manner and employed rich Fauvist colouring. Between 1925 and 1932, Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship legally and financially reconstituted art exhibitions, creating a national, centralised and government-promoted system, under which Raphael exhibited for the first time in Rome in 1929 in both a well-received group exhibition of work by women artists Otto pittrici e scultrici romance and at the first Exhibition of the Fascist Syndicate of the Fine Arts. In 1930 she moved back to Paris with Mafai, where her interest in sculpture flourished and from then on she devoted herself mainly to this medium. Between 1931 and 1932 she returned to London, where, in August 1931, she painted Yom Kippur in the Synagogue (Private Collection), depicting the synagogue on Whitechapel Road, writing to Mafai: ‘I wish you were here to advise me because it’s all about the perspective of the interior and heads, heads, heads, heads [...] I can tell you that if it’s a failure, I’ll have learnt a lot in any case’. Epstein encouraged her experiments with sculpture and also tried unsuccessfully to secure an exhibition of her works at the Redfern Gallery, in anticipation of which, Mafai sent 40 of her paintings to London, including those from her 1929 Rome exhibition and many others painted in Paris, all of which were later lost during the Second World War (probably during the Blitz).
In 1934 Raphaël returned to Rome, where she worked for a year in the studio of sculptor Ettore Colla and created her best-known sculpture, Fuga da Sodoma (Escape from Sodom), also exhibiting from 1936–38 at the Sindacali. Following the introduction of anti-Semitic Fascist legislation in 1938, she and her daughters took refuge in Genoa at the home of the Jewish art collector Emilio Jesi and engineer and collector Alberto Della Ragione, where they remained until the end of the war. Afterwards, she participated in important exhibitions, such as the 1948 National Survey of Figurative Arts at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, where, adding her father’s given name to her own, she exhibited as ‘De Simon Raphaël’. In the following years, she participated in the Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadriennale and many other international exhibitions. Ill health gradually brought her sculptural practice to an end, and, following her husband’s death in 1965, she concentrated on painting. Annetta Raphaël died in Rome, Italy in 1975. Her work is not represented in UK public collections but is in many collections in Italy.