[1] Ciągliński was born into a noble family and studied at the University of Warsaw from 1876 to 1878, at the Faculty of Medicine and Natural Sciences.

Many well-known painters were among his students, including Yury Annenkov, Ivan Bilibin, Eugene Lanceray, Pavel Filonov, Elena Guro and Piotr Buchkin.

In addition to portraits, landscapes and decorative works, he also produced paintings on Orientalist subjects, based on sketches he made during extensive trips throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

[1] As an amateur pianist, many of his portraits were of musicians, including Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Anton Rubinstein and Josef Hofmann.

His brother, Adam Ciągliński [pl], was a prominent neurologist who wrote several pioneering works in medical statistics.