Gerard Pieter Adolfs spent his youth in Java and received at home his first artistic inspirations. His father, Gerardus Cornelis Adolfs, was an all-round amateur (painter, photographer, pianist and violinist). Adolfs studied architecture in Holland and constructed houses. But soon he changed the drawing-pen with etching pin, crayon and pencil. In 1924 he had for the first time an exhibition of etchings and drawings. He stayed in Florence, Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and (together with his Japanese friend Fujita) in Paris and had exhibitions in Java, Japan, Singapore, England, Holland, and San Francisco. The main subjects of his work are scenes of Java, Bali, Japan (market sceneries, cock-fights, landscapes and town-scapes) and of North Africa. In 1940, just before the occupation of Holland, Adolfs came back to Europe. Many of his paintings got lost together with the torpedoed ship "Simaloer". Further paintings were destroyed 1944 by the bombardment of Nijmegen. But Adolfs continued working. He wrote and illustrated a book about Surabaya and had further exhibitions in a lot of well-known galleries. He lived mostly in Amsterdam, interrupted by longer stays in Scandinavia, France, Spain, Italy and North Africa. In 1967 Adolfs retired to a small village in South-Holland. He died on the 1st of February 1968 in s'Hertogenbosch, Holland.