Biography
Ferenc Erdélyi or Francis de Erdély was born on May 4, 1904 in Budapest. In 1919, he was admitted to the Budapest School of Applied Arts. Two years later, he transferred to the College of Fine Arts, where he studied with Ágost Benkhard and Gyula Rudnay. In 1923, he went to Paris, then Madrid for a year, then Barcelona, then Alexandria and Cairo. In 1924, he lived in Algiers for half a year, where he received numerous orders for portraits from the country's governors and chancellors. During his travels, he had exhibitions in almost all the mentioned cities, and in 1926 he also presented himself in New York and Philadelphia. At the beginning of 1928, he returned to Budapest, but shortly afterwards he went to Switzerland, Finland, and then the Netherlands. In the first half of the 1930s, he lived in The Hague and Amsterdam. In the fall of 1936, he returned to Hungary with his Dutch wife, but after three years he traveled to New York. He finally settled in America, where, in addition to painting, he trained artists until his death. He first taught in The Hague, at the Dutch Academy of Arts, then in Pasadena, and from 1945 at the art department of the University of Southern California. He died in 1959 in Los Angeles.
