Von Pedersen studied at the Academy of Arts in Copenhagen before travelling first to Germany and then to London where he met his older brother who worked on a tobacco plantation in Sumatra. There he decided in 1898 to visit his brother in Sumatra where he arrived after a short stop in Sri Lanka. From there he travelled and painted in Penang, Singapore, Java and Siam. On his way back to Denmark he stopped in Bombay where he painted the portrait of the Maharadja of Burdwan. Von Pedersen spent twenty years in South and South East Asia, painting portraits of all the different peoples of South East Asia; Indians, Sri Lankans, Malay, Arabs, Thai, Indonesians and Chinese. He also painted old temples, landscapes, particularly volcanoes, and city-scapes of the many different places he visited in Asia.