Hardcover-Large Landscape edition. Yasharel Manzy was born in the ancient Jewish ghetto of Isfahan, Iran. He immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-one. After some twenty years of doing many different types of work, Yasharel was overwhelmed by the need for artistic expression and finally, at the age of forty-two, he abandoned his last business to devote himself to painting. He began traveling extensively, spending long periods in Israel, Costa Rica and Ecuador. But he was especially taken with the landscapes of southern France and Italy's Tuscany area. These dramatic vistas became his muse and, from time to time, he is drawn back to revisit them. Yasharel is primarily a self-taught intuitive painter who gains inspiration from both the world around him and his deep love of classical music. His paintings touch upon the emotional core that we each hold within us. Yasharel has been exhibiting regularly in Atlanta for the last twenty years. He has had over forty solo exhibitions in galleries in the United States. Claude Wegscheider was Executve Director of Alliance Française d'Atlanta, the French Cultural Center, from 1983 until 2007, where some of Yasharel's first solo exhibitions were successfully held in the early 1990s. They have shared a very close friendship ever since.