The famous painting by Egon Schiele (1890-1918) Portrait of Wally, subject of a twelve-year –long legal dispute, is finally back on the walls of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, after it paid  the legitimate owner’s heirs  the amount of 19 million dollars (14,5 million euros).

Before the trial, scheduled to take place on July 26, the Manhattan Attorney’s Office announced that the Viennese museum and the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray reached an agreement, thus ending the controversy over the canvas painted by Schiele in 1912 and looted by Nazis.

The Leopold Museum , which hosts the collection of Rudolf Leopold who died recently, had to pay almost twenty million dollars in order to keep the painting.

In 1997, the Viennese museum sent Portrait of Wally on loan to New York, for an exhibition at the MoMa. In 1999 it was seized by the federal authorities so as to investigate its provenance and establish whether it was stolen.

The suspicions were confirmed. The painting was confiscated in 1930 from the Jewish art dealer by a Nazi agent after the German occupation of Vienna. Jaray had to flee to London, where she died in 1969 without ever recovering the painting.

The parties have also agreed that, before it returns to Vienna, Portrait of Wally will be exhibited for three weeks at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Also, the Ludwig Museum will place a note next to the painting, in the room where it is exhibited as well as in the rooms where it will be exhibited on loan. The note will explain in detail how it was stolen by Nazis.

The portrait shows Valerie Neuzil, Egon Schiele’s first model and lover for four years. After the World War II Schiele became one of the most prominent XX century Austrian artists. 

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