Louis Charles Moeller was born in New York City. He was the son of a decorative painter, with whom he served a three years' apprenticeship. He then studied painting in New York with E. M. Ward and Will Hicok Low, and in Munich with Feodor Dietz and Frank Duveneck. His meager resources obligated him to return from Munich back home to New York in 1883, where he again devoted himself to decorative painting.

The year of his return, he submitted A Girl in a Snow-Storm to the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition. The following year he submitted Puzzled, and was awarded the First Hallgarten Prize. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1884, and elected an Academician in 1895.

For a decade or more, Louis Charles Moeller was one of the best known and most popular of American genre painters. His work appeared in the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design in New York City, and they were acquired by a number of the leading collectors of contemporary art of the late nineteenth century. It is an aspect of American art that has been forgotten and even eclipsed in its own time by the bright, scintillating colorism of Impressionism.

He died in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1930.