After attending the
Gymnasium in Bozen, Delug started painting, with encouragement from the painter
Heinrich Schöpfer. He moved to
Innsbruck and began studying history at the
University of Innsbruck, staying until 1880, when he moved to Vienna and enrolled at the academy, studying under the painter
Leopold Carl Müller. In 1885, he began a three-year period of travelling, visiting England, Italy, France, Germany and Holland, then settled in
Munich in 1888 and accepted orders for historical and religious paintings. In 1896, he moved back to Vienna, and became a founding member of the
Vienna Secession, though he resigned from it in 1898. Delug joined the academy as a professor in 1898, and became the director of the
Allgemeine Malerschule (General School of Painting). His students there included
Karl Sterrer,
Anton Velim,
Hans Fronius,
Anton Kolig,
Hubert Lanzinger,
Albert Stolz,
Hans Popp,
Oddone Tomasi (the author of Delug's portrait above) and
Franz Gruss. He visited America in 1923–24, and retired from teaching in 1928. According to
Josef Greiner, Delug denied
Adolf Hitler a place at the academy because of inadequate drawing ability. However, according to
Brigitte Hamann, Delug was perennially at odds with the rest of the faculty, who did not share his
Modernist and Secessionist tastes, and in 1907–08, he was not in Vienna after another falling-out. Therefore, the admission decision largely fell to the other director of the painting school,
Christian Griepenkerl. Other historians have also discounted Greiner as a fraud. He was buried in
Grinzinger Cemetery in a
gewidmet Grab (honoured grave; group 19, number 290). In 1931, a road in
Döbling was named the
Delugstraße (Delug Street) in his honour. His painting
The Markl Family (1907) was shown as part of
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, an exhibition at the
National Gallery, London, from October 2013 to January 2014. == Selected works ==