Painter and printmaker Adriaan Lubbers was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1892. Though he showed an interest in art from an early age, he was discouraged from pursuing it by his father in favor of a more lucrative trade. He traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to study for and earn a degree in mechanical engineering in the 1910s, returning to Amsterdam in 1914. At this point he began pursuing art despite his family's wishes and became associated with the Bergense school of Dutch aritsts and styles.

In 1916, having had a fallout with his family and now cut off from their monetary support, Lubbers decided to move to New York City to study on his own. This experience proved to be pivotal, as he would return to images of New York throughout his career. He held down various odd jobs to support himself, including as a factory worker, fishmonger, a chauffeur, and cabaret singer. In his spare time, he painted urban scenes and landmarks. Despite struggle, he flourished artistically and found new friends among the New York modernists.

In 1919 Lubbers returned to the Netherlands, settling at the Bergan artist's colony in Holland. There he met fellow artist Leo Gestel, and the two traveled and worked in Dresden, Germany, and Positano, Italy from 1923-'24. At this time, European modernism, especially Cubism and Expressionism, had established itself as a global influence, and Lubbers' work took on an exaggerated angularity that lent itself to his urban imagery. He returned to the U.S. in 1926 and remained there for two years, painting and exhibiting in New York and Chicago. He built up a portfolio of New York-based drawings that he would bring with him to Paris in 1928 to print in lithograph, creating a series of lithographs he published in 1929 which he used to support himself while living in the art metropolis. In 1930, he was given a show at Galerie Zak in Paris that highlighted his New York paintings and his lithographs. This imagery would later become noted as among the most significant to illustrate New York between the wars. 

Lubbers returned to the U.S. to design the Old Dutch Village for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. From then, Lubbers would travel frequently between Europe and the U.S., working and exhibiting. In 1937 he was given a solo exhibition at the Rockefeller Center. He continued to live an itinerant artist's life, traveling between Amsterdam, Paris, New York, and Chicago until his death from a stroke in 1954, in New York City.