Academic painter Frano Šimunović entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1930 in the class of Ljubo Babić and Jozo Kljaković and graduated in 1934. From 1943 to 1953 he stayed in Spain on a study trip. He lived in Madrid from 1934 to 1935, where he copied the works of D. Velázquez and F. Goya in the Prado Museum and drew expressive, often grotesque figural compositions and landscapes in the Madrid suburbs. In 1963, he became a correspondent, and since 1979, a regular member of JAZU.

In the period 1935-41. painted landscapes from Dalmatia in more intense colors with the visible influence of V. van Gogh. For II. during the World War, he mainly made drawings with themes of fugitives and camps, but also paintings inspired by Goya's works. After the war, he recorded landscapes from the Dalmatian Zagora, mainly fences, mounds, borders and patches of arable land, which will remain his main painterly preoccupation. In the analysis of the harsh landscape of Zagora, the palette calmed down to muted tonal relationships (black, brown, green), and some surfaces are delimited by white lines that dynamize the surface and give the picture an always different rhythm. From the 1960s, by summarizing geometric elements and further reducing colors and tonal relationships, he approached abstraction.