Born on 25 December 1833 in Dessau, Germany, Princess Adelheid Marie was the daughter of Prince Frederick Augustus of Anhalt-Dessau and Princess Marie Louise Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel. Growing up in a family that valued the arts, she developed a keen interest in landscape painting from an early age. During a stay in Denmark at the age of sixteen, she was introduced to oil painting by the painter Heinrich Buntzen, a teacher and member of the Copenhagen Academy.

A pupil of Carl Irmer and Otto Reinhard Jacobi - representatives of the Düsseldorf school - she favoured the representation of idyllic scenes, sensitive to the atmosphere and balance of the composition. Still lifes and floral studies are recurring motifs in her work, but she also enjoyed painting outdoors, particularly along the Lahn.

Among her teachers were the painter Benjamin-Constant, whose studio she frequented in Paris, and the Viennese painter Victor Stauffer, whom she asked to paint her portrait.

During long stays at her castles in Königstein and Hohenburg, she continued her pictorial research under the influence of the Munich school and enriched the décor of her residences with her own compositions; there are even decorations by her hand in the Protestant Immanuel Church in Königstein.

Keen to support artists, she had the ‘Malerhaus’ built in the vicinity of Hohenburg, a chalet which she made available to Munich painters during the summer, offering them accommodation and meals in a spirit of generous patronage.

After Grand Duke Adolphe ascended the throne in 1890, she called upon the Belgian architect Gédéon Bordiau, who had already transformed her summer residence in Königstein in a neo-Renaissance style. Certain historicising features can be found in the extensions built in Luxembourg, reflecting the permanence of her architectural tastes.

Already honorary president of the Nassauischer Kunstverein, she promoted the development of the Cercle Artistique de Luxembourg: when it was founded in 1894, she became its patron and encouraged other public figures to join. She herself regularly exhibited paintings there until 1911. In 1902, she initiated the creation of the Grand Duke Adolphe Prize, which is awarded each year to the best work exhibited at the Salon of the Cercle artistique de Luxembourg.

After the death of Grand Duke Adolphe in 1905, Grand Duchess Adelheid Marie retired permanently to Königstein to devote herself to painting and photography, as well as to the education of her granddaughters, who visited her regularly. It was there that she died on 24 November 1916, in the midst of the First World War.

In October 1953, her coffin was transferred from Hohenburg Castle, where she lay alongside her husband Adolphe, to the Sovereign crypt of Weilburg. The reburial ceremony, on 20 October, was attended by her great-grandchildren, Hereditary Grand Duke Jean and his brothers and sisters. Their presence marked the dynastic continuity with their ancestors, both in Nassau and Luxembourg.