Franz Joseph Rederer was born in Zurich, Switzerland on November 7, 1899. Rederer attended the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich (now the Zurich University of the Arts) in 1917. In the late 1930s he taught art at Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, Venezuela where he married Hilda Edmunda Morales in March of 1937. In 1940, they moved to the US and settled in the San Francisco Bay area. He was naturalized in March of 1946 while living in Berkeley, California. Hilda died of TB while in Switzerland on a trip on January 10, 1950.
 
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. Franz Joseph Rederer died in Zurich, Switzerland in 1965.