A View of Badacsony from Boglár (1932)

During her high school years, she spent summers at the painting school in Nagybánya, preparing for the drawing academy. After graduation she went to the College of Fine Arts, where she became a student of István Bosznay. In the meantime, she studied in Nagybánya for three summers, and then again with István Réti at the Academy of Fine Arts. She obtained a diploma as a drawing and needlework teacher. On 26 April 1919 she became the wife of the royal engineer Ferenc Hallóssy. She was a permanent exhibitor at the National Salon and a member of the Hungarian Association of Women Artists. She made several study trips to Austria, Germany and Italy. She was mainly a portrait painter, but also an excellent landscape painter, especially of Lake Balaton, and she also renewed antique paintings in an artistic way. 

The Hungarian sea, Lake Balaton, is a constant theme in Ida Nágel's painting. In her Badacsony View from Boglár (1932), she depicts the lake's famous mountain in the setting twilight, a task that so many Hungarian painters (e.g. Sándor Brodszky, Károly Telepy, József Egry, Imre Szobotka, Gyula Hincz) have done before and after. Nágel paints in an almost pastel style, her colours and brushwork fitting in with the Hungarian post-impressionist works between the two world wars.