Adolf Kaufmann was born in Opava, Austrian Silesia (now Troppau, the Czech Republic ) on May 15, 1848. After his early educated in Opava, where he began to draw and paint without any formal training, he traveled to Paris, France where he studied painting with Emile van Marcke de Lummen, a successful realist painter of peasant life thriving in a verdant and idyllic nature.

During this period Kaufmann is recorded as traveling extensively throughout central Europe, Russia, Poland, the Netherlands, Turkey and the Levant. He visited, and studied for a while in Berlin, Dusseldorf and Munich before settling in Vienna, Austria, where, together with fellow painter Carl Freiherr van Merode, a painter of portraits and interior genre scenes, Ka...