Roland Ladwig was born in Wedel (Lower Saxony) in 1935. He studied art in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Munich and Berlin from 1957 to 1961. He also attended the summer academy of Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg during this time. As a landscape painter, he was active mainly in Norway and southern France. Ladwig lived and worked in Berlin, the Provence and Italy. He died in Berlin in 2014.