Ignatz Pick grew up as the eldest of nine children of the second-hand dealer Josef Pick and his wife Katharina Pick née Berger in a rented apartment at Rathausstrasse 19 in Vienna’s 1st district. In the same building complex, at Landesgerichtsstrasse 20, the father ran his second-hand shop on the ground floor. Ignatz Pick took over the shop in 1896 and changed the company name to Ign. Pick. In 1897, he married Gisela Fischer, who was born in Nikolsburg/Mikulov, South Moravia, in the Vienna City Temple. The couple had two daughters: Margarethe (1898) and Alice (1900). Margarethe Pick married the Minsk-born opera singer, jeweller and communist Julian Epstein in 1920. In 1924, Alice Pick married the neurologist Paul Löwy, and their daughter Hanna Miriam Löwy was born in 1925. Ignatz Pick, who had acquired a license to trade in antiques in 1914, had been involved in the Association of Antiques and Art Dealers in Vienna since 1927 and was elected its vice-president in 1930. Ignatz and Gisela Pick privately built up an extensive art collection consisting of 19th century paintings in their apartment at Rathausstrasse 19.

After Austria’s annexation to the Nazi German Reich in March 1938, the Pick family was exposed to Nazi persecution due to their Jewish origins. In December 1938, Ignatz Pick's antiques business was placed under the provisional administration of the art historian Robert Grehs on behalf of the deputy regional director of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Marcell Kammerer. It was then sold to Hilde Attems and Maria Offermann at the price of RM 18,729 which had already been reduced by the property transaction office. After deducting the illegal taxes, only RM 3,000 remained in a blocked account. In April 1938, the Dorotheum expert Franz Kieslinger valued the art collection, which consisted of 169 items, at approximately RM 21,000. Margarethe and Julian Epstein left Austria for France at the beginning of April 1938. Their daughter Monique Epstein was born in Toulouse in 1941. In 1942, Julian Epstein was arrested, and in 1943, he was deported to the Majdanek extermination camp, where he was murdered immediately upon arrival. Margarethe Epstein and her daughter survived the German occupation as so-called “U-Boote” (U-Boot = submarine, people hiding from the Nazis) in the south of France. Paul and Hanna Löwy fled to New York in September 1938, Alice Löwy followed her family in March 1939. Upon arrival in the USA, they changed the spelling of their name to Loewy. 

Ignatz Pick died in the hospital of the Israelite religious community on 25 February 1941. After the legal court's inheritance decision, the acting administrator Robert Grehs sold the remaining art objects from the private collection and paid the proceeds into three blocked accounts for the benefit of the heiresses. Gisela Pick was able to escape to Cuba in October 1941, from where she travelled to the USA in 1943. With the decision of the Chief Finance President of Wien-Niederdonau at the Vienna 1st District Court in March 1944, all of Gisela Pick, Alice Löwy and Margarethe Epstein’s assets were forfeited to the Nazi German Reich in accordance with the 11th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act of 1941.

Margarethe and Monique Epstein emigrated to the USA in 1947. In 1948, Alice Loewy, represented by the Viennese writer George Saiko, and Maria Offermann concluded a restitution settlement for Ignatz Pick's confiscated antiques business, which included the restitution of the entire stock in the warehouse. Between 1956 and 1958, Alice Loewy was able to obtain the restitution of a total of 13 pictures from her parents' art collection, but these were not released for export. The Historical Museum of the City of Vienna acquired 12 paintings in 1957 and 1958. The portrait Mutter des Künstlers by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was sold to the Austrian Gallery in 1960. Alice Loewy married her long-term partner, the writer and sociologist Erich von Kahler, in 1969, after the death of her first husband Paul Loewy in 1955. Gisela Pick died in New York in 1962. After the First Art and Cultural Property Realisation Act was passed in 1969, Alice Loewy claimed the delivery of another five art objects from her parents' collection on 12 December 1969. In a letter to the Vienna Financial Directorate dated 20 October 1970, the Federal Monuments Office asked for "restitution according to expendability", whereby all five objects were handed over. The sisters Margarethe Epstein and Alice Loewy-Kahler died in 1988 and 1991, respectively. It was not until the Art Restitution Act of 1998 that  further restitutions took place: In 2001, the Federal Art Restitution Advisory Board decided to return two pictures from the Albertina Graphic Collection to the heirs of Ignatz Pick. In 2006/2007, the Vienna Museum also restituted six art objects from the former Ignatz Pick Collection. The painting Ausritt zur Parforcejagd aus Schloß Orth by Franz Rumpler has not yet been restituted. It was acquired from the Dorotheum by the German Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Zix in 1941 and donated to the State of Lower Austria in 1972. It is now in the State Collections of Lower Austria.