Eduard Epstein was one of seven children of Moritz Epstein, a teacher from Bohemia, and his wife Babette. In 1904, he married Margarete Kraus in  accordance with Mosaic rites in Prague. Eduard Epstein was a successful commercial agent and merchant in the textile industry. From 1910 to 1927, he was an authorised representative of the Vienna branch of the Bohemian Friedrichswald J. S. Perlhefter mechanical weaving mill, was involved in various trading companies in the clothing industry and was on the board of the Association of the Textile Industry. In 1927, Eduard Epstein and his business partners Hugo Hirsch and Max Weinberger founded the general partnership Epstein, Hirschler & Co, which saw itself as a trading agency, commission merchant business and textile wholesaler. In 1917, Epstein had acquired an apartment building located at Boerhaavegasse 21 in Vienna’s 3rd district,. In his flat at Josefstädterstraße 87 in Vienna’s 8th district, Epstein housed his art collection. Nothing is known about the individual works and scope.

After the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, Epstein had to submit a declaration of assets on 15 July 1938, which did not name any works of art apart from a collection of silver coins. In December 1938, the company Epstein, Hirschler & Co. based in Vienna, at Börseplatz 6, was liquidated and deleted from the commercial register. During a house search on 16 December 1938, the Gestapo seized undeclared jewellery, a coin collection and other silver objects that Eduard Epstein had hidden in the flat of an ‘Aryan woman’. In April 1939, Epstein made an unsuccessful attempt to get large sums of money and valuables abroad through an intermediary for which, he was imprisoned in the Vienna Regional Criminal Court from 3 May 1939 to 7 March 1940.

The confiscated jewellery and precious metal objects were handed over to the Vienna Dorotheum for sale in autumn 1939, followed in 1940 by silver objects from the property of Eduard and Margarethe Epstein as part of the Section 14 deliveries to the Vienna Dorotheum. In February 1940, Eduard Epstein was forced to sell his apartment building on Boerhaavegasse. After his release from prison, he submitted an export application to the Federal Monuments Authority on 27 March 1940. This listed twelve oil paintings, a watercolour, various knick-knacks, twelve carpets and a ‘miniature of Theer’. With the exception of the miniature, the application was approved. On 28 March, the Federal Monuments Authority handed over the watercolour miniature to the Heeresmuseum Wien (HGM) for acquisition. The object was entered in the inventory book on 12 April 1940, together with the purchase price of  RM 100 and the name of the seller, Epstein.

The Viennese shipping company Rudolf Löwinger transferred the rest of Eduard Epstein's art collection together with his remaining possessions in a lift van to the free port of Trieste on 9 August 1940 and stored it at Lloyd Triestino. On the basis of the Eleventh Regulation on the Reich Citizenship Law of 25 November 1941, Friedrich Rainer, the Supreme Commissioner in the operation Zone ‘Adriatic Coastal Zone‘ , seized the moving lift and handed it over to the NSDAP Gauleitung Berlin on 9 March 1944. The lift was then transported to Berlin/West Harbour (‘Masse Adria’). There is no documentation about its whereabouts.

With the help of the Gildemeester emigration campaign, Eduard and Margarethe Epstein emigrated to the USA via Lisbon on 22 May 1941, where their daughter Helene Wahle, born in 1906, and remarried Lieb, had fled with her husband in August 1939 and where three of Eduard Epstein's siblings were already living. The couple reached New York on 21 June 1941. Eduard Epstein died there in 1943, scarred by imprisonment and persecution.

Following restitution proceedings in 1951, the heirs obtained restitution of the ‘aryanised’ property on Boerhaavegasse. The proceedings against the restitution offices in Berlin for the expropriated moving crate ended with a settlement in 1960. The Settlement Fund compensated only a fraction of the ‘Reich Flight Tax’ paid by Epstein, the confiscated bank accounts, shares, the ‘Account D’ assets deposited with the IKG Vienna and insurance policies. On the basis of the dossier, which was submitted to the Art Restitution Advisory Board for information, the Board recommended the return of the sheet from the HGM to the legal successors of Eduard Epstein at its 65th Advisory Board meeting on 8 March 2013.