Franz Felix grew up in Vienna, Austria, and as a child developed an early facility for drawing portraits in charcoal. He studied portraiture at the Vienna Academy under Arthur de Ferraris, a portrait painter of dignitaries. Under the guidance of de Ferraris, Felix’s style of drawing became more refined as he learned the techniques of painting through his teacher’s insistence on exacting procedures of composition and preliminary studies of a subject.

Felix arrived in the United States shortly after World War I. After an initial stay in New York, he moved westward and eventually settled in San Francisco. Working in a studio on Telegraph Hill, he successfully established himself as an artist, painting numerous portrait commissions and doing commercial illustrations. Through the 1920s he experimented with various means of expressing his increasing interest in French, German and English literature, creating illustrations for The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs; and Eastern Love, an anthology of folk and love tales of the orient.

In the late 1920s to New York, where he met Marie Dingman; they were married in 1933 in New Paltz and resided in Rockland County. Working in his studio in Spring Valley, Felix continued producing book and magazine illustrations. During World War II Felix was commissioned to paint four murals, which hang in the Banker’s Trust Company in Spring Valley.

With work spanning portraiture, street scenes, and still lifes, Franz Felix succeeded in blending his Viennese training with American subject matter, producing work in a range of styles from classic illustration to accomplished paintings and murals.