Heinrich Rieger

He was born in Sereď an der Waag in the administrative district of Pressburg (now Bratislava), which at that time belonged to the Hungarian half of the empire.

[3] This brought him into contact with young artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, who were then living in Vienna, and became their sponsor.

In the years up to 1921, the inventory grew again by more than 250 works by young painters such as Käthe Kollwitz, Anton Faistauer, Karl Sterrer, Albin Egger-Lienz, Liebermann, and Franz Stuck.

The latter list showed that Rieger had loaned around 200 works of art, including Schiele's oil painting "Cardinal and Nun".

[8] Special anti-Jewish laws forced Austrian Jews like Rieger to declare their assets, in preparation for the seizure of their property.

Forbidden to practice medicine because he was Jewish, and impoverished by the confiscation of property and the Nazi's anti-Jewish fees and penalties, Rieger was forced to sell artworks in November 1938.

Both Welz and Kasimir paid little with undervalued estimates thought to be provided by Nazi Party member Bruno Grimschitz.

After initiating a death declaration procedure, it was established on 7 March 1947 that Heinrich Rieger had been murdered there on 17 October 1942, although specifics remained unclear.

[16][17][18][19][20] In 2002 the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien requested that the Austrian police seize Wayside Shrine (1907) by Egon Schiele, asserting that it had been looted from the Rieger collection.

[21] In 2016 Rieger's heirs filed suit against Robert "Robin" Owen Lehman for Schiele's Portrait of the Artist's Wife (1917).

[24] Its fate after 1938 was unknown until, in 1965, it appeared in a sale by the Brazilian collector Walter Geyerhahn to the Swiss art dealer Marianne Feilchenfeldt.