The landscapist Hugo Darnaut, actually Darnaut-Fix, a follower of Austrian Mood Impressionism, spent his youth in Graz as the son of the court actor Michael Fix, known as Darnaut. He completed an apprenticeship as a theater painter in Vienna with court theater painter Heinrich Burghart, and this was followed by training at the Vienna Academy with Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels (1833–1913). He studied in Düsseldorf on a stipend, at the former centre for landscape painting with Andreas Achenbach, Robert Meyerheim and Johannes Wortmann.

In 1877 he became a member of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. In the 1890s, he took lessons with Gustav Schönleber in Karlsruhe. From 1893 to 1912, Darnaut sojourned at the castle of Plankenberg in the Vienna Woods, an artists' colony of landscape painting, where Emil Jakob Schindler also worked as a teacher since 1885. He first taught in Schloss Plankenstein after Emil Jakob Schindler’s death, and then in Maria Anzbach from 1912. He taught numerous pupils. In 1912 he moved to the Gschwendthof near Plankenberg; from 1913 to 1918, he was president of the Association of Visual Artists in Vienna.

Sources:
Auctionata
Dorotheum, Vienna