Portrait of a girl (Magdolna Szűcs) (1952)

He studied with Sándor Nyilasy in Szeged and with Oszkár Glatz at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1924 and 1928. As a college student, he participated in the Jászapáti, Mohács and Putnok workshops. From 1930 he lived and taught in Debrecen (Reformed Secondary School, then Teachers' Training Institute). From 1932 he was a member of the fine arts department of the Ady Society, and from 1945-1949 he was head of the department. In 1934 he went to Paris, and from 1933 he made several study trips to Nagybánya. His pictures were regularly shown at exhibitions of the Szinyei Society, the Munkácsy Guild and the UME. Félegyházy, who returned as a deserter in 1944, had to accept that a good part of his career, 15 years of work, had been lost in the war. From 1947 he taught at the Debrecen Free School of Fine Arts and later at the Ferenc Medgyessy Studio.  By 1950 he had already received the Munkácsy Prize for his oil painting "Furniture Factory Stakhanovist", which has since been one of the main paintings in exhibitions of the 1950s and socialist realism. 

Félegyházi's first artistic period was influenced by the Roman School. Between 1933 and 1936 he painted "semi-abstract" pictures tending towards surrealism, then under the influence of Nagybánya he returned to nature and produced typically post-impressionist landscapes and nudes. Between 1947 and 1957, he painted his portraits and portraits in a realist style. These were called "socialist" pictures, but in fact ~ he painted them with sincere intentions, with the realistic ambition inherited from Glatz. In his portrait of a girl (1952), he transposes the theme of the peasant girl portraits, a favourite subject of his master Glatz, into a 'working-class', puritan environment, painted in a realistic manner.