A versatile artist, actor, boxer and soldier, Fred J. Kurtz was born on November 26, 1881 on the Isle of New Hope, Georgia to Elizabeth (a noted singer and painter) and Joseph Kurtz (an inventor of self-playing instruments). When he was a week old, his family moved to New York City.  He went to Philadelphia at a young age, first working at a commercial art business, where he learned crafting and painting stained glass, and later studying art at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and then at the Slade School of London, England.  For a while in his youth, he was a semiprofessional boxer as well as an actor in minstrel shows.

Kurtz was 18 years old when he enlisted in the Army and then served in the Philippines during the insurrection there.

After his army service, Kurtz became an illustrator-correspondent for the London Times, London Illustrated News and then for the Associated Press in Bombay, India, Hong Kong, China, and other parts of the Far and Near East as well as Europe.

From 1904 to 1906, Kurtz lived and painted on an island near Tahiti. Another time, he painted among Native Americans in the Western U.S. and became an expert bow and arrow maker and pottery and bead artist. His stained glass window work appears in churches in New York, Pennsylvania and Europe. The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition of his stained glass windows in 1957.

In World War I,  Kurtz served with the U.S. Army in the Signal Corps, assisting in making movies and in World War II, he helped train dogs for the K-9 Corps.

He opened an art shop in New York City in 1924 but moved to Hunterstown, Pennsylvania in 1932, where he resided for the remainder of his life.

Frederick J. Kurtz died in Hunterstown in May of 1963.