After the publication, the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, to whom the work had belonged before World War II, contacted the New York County District Attorney who issued a subpoena forbidding its return to Austria.

Schiele and Wally wanted to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic Viennese milieu, and went to the small town of Český Krumlov (Krumau) in southern Bohemia.

Schiele's way of life aroused much animosity among the town's inhabitants, and in April 1912 he was arrested and jailed for seducing a young girl below the age of consent, and more than a hundred of his drawings were seized as pornographic.

Although the charge of seduction was dropped, he was found guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children and sentenced to 3 additional days in jail besides the 3 weeks already served.

Bondi recounted that she had met Rudolph Leopold in London in 1953 and asked for his assistance in retrieving the painting from the museum, offering to help him acquire other works by Schiele.

[8] In a 1995 catalogue of works by Schiele, Leopold inserted the claim that the picture had been part of the Rieger collection that he had earlier acquired from the Austrian National Gallery.

New York County District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau subpoenaed the Portrait of Wally together with another Schiele painting in January 1998, claiming that they had been improperly acquired Nazi loot.

[10] In legal proceedings, the museum stated that Bondi had decided to drop the matter in 1954 and that there was no evidence to show that Leopold knew that the painting had been Nazi plunder when he acquired it.

[11] In early July 2010, sources indicated to The Art Newspaper that the Bondi estate would accept $20 million as restitution for the painting in a deal completed shortly before Leopold's death the previous month, weeks before a civil trial was scheduled to start in United States District Court.

[1][2] The history of the painting and the legal efforts by the Bondi heirs to recover it are the subject of the 2012 documentary Portrait of Wally by filmmaker Andrew Shea.