Francisco Rebajes was born in the Dominican Republic in 1907 and immigrated to New York in 1922. He was a self-taught craftsman and began his career by fashioning tin cans and other scraps of metal into animal forms. In 1934 he opened a shop at 184 West Fourth Street, where he made boxes, platters, bowls, candlesticks, and jewelry primarily out of silver and copper. In 1937 his jewelry was featured in the exhibition Contemporary Industrial and Handwrought Silver at the Brooklyn Museum. His work garnered attention for its sculptural and dynamic quality, which often took on a machine aesthetic in the middle decades of the twentieth century. By the early 1950s, Rebajes opened a store on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Seventh Street and was selling his jewelry through stores nationwide. He then moved his workshop to Seventeenth Street and employed a sizable staff of craftsmen to make his designs.