The artist August Kurz was born in 1856 in the Swiss market town of St. Gallen, and in memory of the Burg Gallenstein in his homeland, and to distinguish him from his brother, Arthur Kurz, who also was an artist, he added the suffix Gallenstein. From an early age he showed a great aptitude for art and in 1878 he attended the drawing academy in Graz, before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he earned a good reputation as a painter of genre, portraits and landscapes.