Siegfried Berndt was born in Goerlitz, Germany in 1880. He began his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Art and, later, received a travel scholarship that brought him to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, London, and eventually, Scotland. It is hypothesized that Berndt traveled to Scotland to study with Frank Morely Fletcher, who became director of the Edinburgh College of Art in 1906, to learn how to create color woodcuts in the Japanese style. Berndt’s color woodcuts were modern for their time; falling somewhere between German, French, Japanese, and Scottish influences.