Christian von Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the Universität Wien.
Christian Rohlfs
He was born in Groß Niendorf, Kreis Segeberg in Prussia. He took up painting as a teenager while convalescing from an infection that was eventually to lead to the amputation of a leg in 1874. He began his formal artistic education in Berlin, before transferring, in 1870, to the Weimar Academy. Initially he painted large-scale landscapes, working through a variety of academic, naturalist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist styles. In 1901 left Weimar for Hagen, where the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus had offered him a studio in the modern art museum he was setting up there. Meetings with  Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde and the experience of seeing the works of Vincent van Gogh inspired him to move towards the expressionist style, in which he would work for the rest of his career.