Hugo Darnaut

Hugo Darnaut was born on November 28, 1851. His father is the court actor Michael Fix, called Darnaut, in Dessau, Germany. He spent his youth in Graz and then went to Vienna to start an apprenticeship with the court theater painter Heinrich Burghart. In 1871 he studied for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts with Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels. He came to Düsseldorf thanks to a scholarship. Düsseldorf was considered to be the center of landscape painting at that time and. He there studied with Andreas Achenbach, Robert Meyerheim and Johannes Wortmann and met Marie Egner, to whom he remained close for life. Back in Vienna, he became a member of the Künstlerhaus in 1877 and maintained close contact with the artists Tina Blau-Lang, Robert Russ and Emil Jakob Schindler, who also focused on atmospheric landscape paintings in their work. Darnaut, who followed the Austrian mood impressionism, rented the Plankenberg Castle in the Vienna Woods from 1893 to 1912 after Schindler's death, which is where Schindler had also taught landscape painting. In 1900 Darnaut and Erwin Pendl created a bird's eye view of Vienna for the World Exhibition in Paris. Darnaut died in Vienna on January 9, 1937.