Frank Rebajes was born on February 6, 1906 in the Dominican Republic, to a family of Spanish immigrants from Mallorca. His father had a small workshop for repairing and making shoes, where little Francisco grew up, playing with tools and helping with the work. At the age of 16, after a brief school education, in which he showed little interest, Francisco went to the United States to earn money. He got by with odd jobs until the Great Depression began and the young man found himself on the street, literally. He collected tin cans and scrap metal, from which he began to make animal figurines, the first was a tiny metal horse.
In 1931, Francisco Rebadji participated in the first street art exhibition on Washington Square. His animals, neatly displayed on an iron table, attracted the attention of the then director of the Whitney Museum. So Rebadji received an offer to buy all ten of his figurines for $30!
With this money, the young man rents a barn in Greenwich Village and begins his creative and commercial activities, creating objects, jewelry and animal figurines from metal, and later from copper. In 1932, at a party in Greenwich Village, he met his future wife Paulina Schwartz. Success was not long in coming, in 1941, the first Rebadgi showroom opens on Fifth Avenue. And a large workshop on 17th Street, where 40 people worked.
Francisco Rebadgi personally designed all the objects that came out under his name, not only costume jewelry, but also ashtrays, plates, wall plaques and other trinkets. Mostly everything was made of copper, sometimes of silver, especially during the war, when all the copper was supplied for the needs of weapons. Rebadji and his wife Paulina ran the business until the early 1960s, when they sold the business and moved to Spain, where Francisco lived and worked until his death in 1990.
