Born in Zürich, Switzerland, Franz Joseph Rederer attended the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich (now the Zurich University of the Arts) in 1917. Well travelled in Europe and the Americas, in the late 1930s he taught art at Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1940, he moved to the US and settled in the San Fransisco Bay area, receiving citizenship in 1946. Rederer exhibited widely in the US, Switzerland, Germany and Austria and he is known primarily for his expressionist still-lifes and portraiture of musicians and composers.