[2] He began his formal artistic education in Berlin,[2] before transferring, in 1870, to the Weimar Academy.

[1] In 1901 Rohlfs left Weimar for Hagen, where through the architect Henri van der Velde got to know the art collector Karl Ernst Osthaus who offered him a studio in an estate which would become the Museum Folkwang.

[1] In 1908, at the age of 60, he made his first prints after seeing an exhibition of works by the expressionist group Die Brücke.

The outbreak of World War I worried Rohlfs such, that for some time he felt unable to paint.

[3] In rare instances he experimented with heavily hand-coloring his prints, onto the verge of painting and sometimes well after they were made, as in his 1919 recoloring of the prior year's Der Gefangene.