Ion Musceleanu trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest under Fritz Stork for drawing and Constantin Artachino and G. D. Mirea for painting, completing his studies in 1926. He subsequently worked as a drawing teacher in Râmnicu Vâlcea, where the surrounding landscape drew his attention more persistently than the classroom, establishing the plein-air practice that would define his career.

His exhibition debut came in 1930 at the Official Salon of Painting and Sculpture with the watercolor Case (Houses). Solo exhibitions followed in 1940, 1957, 1968, and 1973, and from 1948 he participated regularly in state annuals and in Romanian art exhibitions abroad, with showings in Minsk, Bratislava, Athens, Berlin, Ankara, Istanbul, Paris, Moscow, Prague, and London. He received multiple prizes at the Official Salons. In 1959 he was part of the team of painters commissioned to paint the ceiling of the National Theatre in Caracal.

Working primarily in landscape and portraiture within an Impressionist orientation, Musceleanu has been placed in critical dialogue with Lucian Grigorescu, sharing a similar commitment to outdoor painting and to a restrained chromatic register. His palette favored warm tones of reduced intensity, producing compositions of quiet atmospheric density rather than chromatic assertion. His works are held in Romanian museum collections and in private hands.