Rudolf Hintermayer, who later became a lawyer and art collector, was born in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in 1917 as the youngest son of Rudolf Hintermayer, who worked in the Vienna municipal administration and later became Deputy Director of Städtische Gaswerke, and his wife Auguste, née Kemmetmüller. In 1933, he began studying law at the University of Vienna, graduating with a doctorate on 11 July 1939. After the "Anschluss", Hintermayer sought admission to the NSDAP and was listed as a party candidate from 1938. From 8 October 1939, Hintermayer served in the Wehrmacht in an air intelligence company and was deployed in what is now Ukraine, among other places. 

After the end of the Second World War, he complied with the registration requirement under Section 4 of the Prohibition Act and his objection to being listed as a National Socialist was upheld. After being registered as a lawyer with the Vienna Bar Association in 1948, he opened his law firm on Schmerlingplatz in Vienna. From the 1950s onwards, Hintermayer devoted himself increasingly to collecting hand drawings and watercolors, and by 1970 his considerable collection of modern art – as he himself wrote in the magazine Alte und Moderne Kunst – included works by around 350 artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Alfred Kubin, Otto Dix and Otto Rudolf Schatz. Works from his collection were displayed on loan to various exhibitions, such as Faszination der Wirklichkeit, an exhibition which consisted entirely of watercolors and drawings from Hintermayer's private collection and took place at the Old Palace in Bregenz in 1970. From 1965 to 1972, Hintermayer worked as an art expert for Dorotheum Vienna, where he carried out valuations for drawings and graphic art. In 1973, he founded the Dom-Galerie at Singerstraße 8 in Vienna's first district and opened it with a selection of works by Wilhelm Traeger. Even before founding the gallery, Hintermayer also appeared as a private seller. In November 1958, for example, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna acquired several of his drawings, some of which came from the collection of the industrialist Otto Brill, which he had purchased at a Dorotheum auction in the same month. In 1965, the Albertina also acquired a drawing by Eugen Jettel from Hintermayer and in 1973 purchased a charcoal drawing by Oskar Kokoschka from him. Following the 1970s, characterized by a rapid succession of exhibitions and loans, the traces of Rudolf Hintermayer have been lost. What happened to his collection after his death in 1983 has not yet been established.