By 1849 Ignác, co-owner of the famed Zsolnay Porcelaine Manufacturer, had sold his interest and moved from Pécs, Kingdom of Hungary, to Bucharest, Wallachia.

His father finally impressed by one of his sculptures, Zolnay studied and graduated from the National School of Fine Arts of Bucharest where he learned under Karl Stork.

[10] Zolnay was first described as the "sculptor of the Confederacy" as early as July 1899, in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the Jefferson Davis memorial.

[17] Family sources and Zolnay's biographer describe his friendship with Varina Davis, and access to the social circle she'd built in New York City, as the foundation of a whole phase of his American career, his "Confederate Period", from 1899 to 1923.

In the same years Zolnay and his studio assistants received a large commission for the two eight-ton lion and tiger,[20] to be placed on top of 40-foot columns, flanking the Delmar road entrance to newly-founded University City, Missouri, an inner suburb developed in parallel with the 1904 fair.

After the lion and tiger were completed in 1909, Zolnay left the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and went to work for his client Lewis, taking at least two of his student proteges (Coonsman and Risque) along.

In 1913 Zolnay moved his studios to Washington, D.C.[22] Beside his sculptural activity, and holding sculpture classes at the Zolnay Atelier,[23] he also delivered lectures on Romania, illustrated with traditional Romanian music and by lantern slides, at the Smithsonian Institution[24] and did illustration work for the two volumes of the book The Roumanians and Their Lands[25] issued by the Roumanian Relief Committee of America in 1919.

[14] His artistic legacy in Romania includes the statue of Tudor Vladimirescu in Târgu-Jiu and a bust of poet Grigore Alexandrescu.