Gerard Pieter Adolfs

A Dutch East Indies painter and architect, Gerard Pieter Adolfs (1898-1968) was known for his intimate and candid portrayals of the life of people of Java and Bali. He had also captured scenes of Japan and North Africa in his artworks.

Pieter Adolfs’s paintings are refreshing, naturalistic, and document the life of tribes in a sheer realistic approach.  At the same time, the technical finesse of draughtsmanship is impeccable, following his expertise in European neoclassicism. Showcasing the rich and unpretentious life of the native locations, the rendition is equally invigorating, bold and wholesome.

Gerard Pieter Adolfs was born in Semarang, Central Java. His journey of artistic and creative inspiration began at home as his father was an architect and an amateur painter, photographer, musician and pole vaulter. Adolfs studied architecture in Amsterdam but after completing his grade, he moved back to Java. Attracted to Java like a magnet, he began designing houses in Yogyakarta, Solo and Surabaya. However, he eventually switched his professional career to painting, expressing the local routines relentlessly.

A painter, watercolourist and graphic artist, Gerard Adolfs was a keen traveller, too, which became his constant inspiring ground. He had studios in Florence, Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Prag and together with his Japanese friend Léonard Tsuguharu Fujita in Paris. Pieter Adolfs had exhibited widely across the world in countries like Japan, Singapore, the U.S.A., Britain, Sweden, Norway, France, Switzerland, Holland and Netherland Indies.

In 1940, shortly before the siege of Holland during World War II, he came back to Europe and settled in Amsterdam. According to Gerard Adolfs, the ultimate ambition of any artist was to sense the truth and then attempt to reproduce it in a way that others will connect with it, too. Gerard Pieter Adolfs passed away in the Dutch city of s-Hertogenbosch.