The son of a German professor of Oriental languages, Ignaz Gaugengigl rebelled against his father's desire that he follow his profession, choosing instead to become an artist. In 1874 he entered the Munich Royal Academy, where he studied under Johann Raab; he also studied in Munich with Wilhelm von Diez. By the time he left the academy four years later, Gaugengigl had established a local reputation as a painter and had executed a commission for King Ludwig II. He spent some time in Italy and France before visiting his sister in Boston in 1878. Although he had planned to stay only three months, the favorable response to his work prompted him to make Boston his home.
Gaugengigl's precisely rendered, small-scale reconstructions of scenes of aristocratic daily life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe were immediately popular with prominent collectors and earned him the title the "Meissonier of Boston." Starting in the mid-1890s, however, he increasingly painted portraits commissioned by members of his elite social circle. Gaugengigl was a well-known and influential figure in the Boston art world. He served as director of the Guild of Boston Artists, sat for twenty years on the council of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and belonged to the Copley Society and the Saint Botolph Club.
