Founder the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen, Germany, industrialist and collector. Osthaus was born to wealth. His father was the banker financier Ernst Osthaus and his mother, Selma Funcke (Osthaus), the daughter of a textile industrialist. He was raised in the industrial Westphalian town of his birth and studied at various German-speaking universities, as was common in Germany at the time, at Kiel, Munich, Berlin, Strasbourg, Vienna and Bonn. He graduated from the university in Bonn in 1898, making trips to southern Europe and Asia, feeding and interest in Ethnology and collecting folk art.