He was the wealthy son of the Marshal of the Court and the director of the Swedish East India Company (SOIC), Count Rutger Axel Sparre, and Sara Christina Sahlgren (1723–1766).

Gustaf Adolf Sparre studied as a teenager at Lund and Uppsala University and spent the years 1768–1771 making a Grand Tour abroad, visiting Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany.

When the remainder of the painting collection was finally sold in 2007, many of the frames that had been ordered by Sparre in 1775 for his initial gallery in Sahgrenska house were still intact, making the match to the original estate inventory considerably easier.

Count Sparre continued to make trips to Europe after he created the gallery, and he purchased three of his cabinet paintings at the estate sale of Antoine Poullain in Paris in 1780: When Count Sparre's only surviving grandchild died without issue, his grandson-in-law sold Kulla Gunnarstorp Castle with its contents (including the cabinet paintings) to Carl de Geer in 1837.

His granddaughter Elisabeth Wachtmeister-von Platen in turn set up a Wachtmeister family trust to hold the paintings, and she had the art historian Georg Göthe make an inventory in 1895.