Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, the Orientalist painter and watercolourist Adolf Seel is one of the most important representatives of the so-called Düsseldorfer Schule (Düsseldorf School) (Bénézit, 2006, p. 923).
He entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Arts) in the winter of 1843–1844 and attended the architecture classes of the German painter, archaeologist and architect Rudolf Wiegmann (1804–1865) who taught him vedute painting. Between 1847 and 1850, he trained in history painting under the German painter Karl Ferdinand Sohn (1805–1867). In 1852, Seel spent several months in Paris. In 1862 he continued his studies in Italy, where he remained for three years and painted Venetian subjects (Haja, & Wimmer, 2000, p. 146).
In 1870 and 1871, he travelled to Spain, Portugal and the north coast of Africa. In Spain, he was particularly interested in the Alhambra in Granada, which he depicted in several of his paintings. In 1873 and 1874, he visited Palestine and Egypt, from where he brought back a wealth of studies and sketches, mainly of architectural monuments, that later served as a basis for his Orientalist paintings. In a letter, the Austrian genre painter Leopold Carl Müller (1834–1892) mentions meeting Seel and the Bavarian-born painter Carl Haag (1820–1915) in February 1874 (Haja, & Wimmer, 2000, p. 146; Bénézit, 2006, p. 923; Rhein, 2003, p. 160).
At the Vienna Exhibition in 1876, Seel was awarded a medal by Archduke Karl Ludwig (1833–1896) for his painting Arabischer Hof in Kairo, which was also shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1887 (Haja, & Wimmer, 2000, p. 146).
Seel specialized in architectural painting, but he also created genre scenes and portraits, sometimes in watercolour. Several of his works were reproduced as woodcuts in the two-volume Aegypten in Bild und Wort written by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers (1837–1898) and published between 1879 and 1880.

Bénézit, E. (ed.) (2006). Seel, Adolf. In Dictionary of artists (Vol. 12, p. 923). Paris: Gründ.

Ebers, G. (1879). Aegypten in Bild und Wort. Dargestellt von unseren ersten Künstlern (Vols. 1–2). Stuttgart: Eduard Hallberger. Retrieved from https://archive.org/search.php?query=external-identifier%3A%22urn%3Aoclc%3Arecord%3A1156051755%22

Haja, M., & Wimmer, G. (2000). Les orientalistes des écoles allemande et autrichienne. Courbevoie: ACR, pp. 146–151.

Rhein, K. (2003). Deutsche Orientmalerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Entwicklung und Charakteristika. Berlin: Tenea.