Bildnis Wally Neuwirth

Schiele painted Wally Neuzil in 1912. She was his model and lover, and he was in his early twenties. But the reason this small portrait became famous has almost nothing to do with the sitter and everything to do with what happened to the picture. Before the Second World War it belonged to Lea Bondi Jaray, a Jewish art dealer in Vienna. When Austria fell to the Nazis in 1938 she was forced out of her gallery and fled to London, and the portrait was taken from her. It surfaced after the war, changed hands, and ended up in the collection that became the Leopold Museum. In 1997, when it was lent to an exhibition in New York, Bondi's heirs recognised it, and the painting was seized. The legal fight ran for 13 years and ended in 2010 with a 19-million-dollar settlement that kept the picture in Vienna. That case helped push Austria to pass its 1998 art-restitution law.