Born in Břeclav in 1885, Valerie Marie - known as Vally - Hoffmann married Josef Honig, president of the M. Honig AG spinning and knitting factory in Heidenreichstein, in 1906. From 1920, Vally and Josef Honig lived with their daughter Gertrud, born in 1907, in an apartment at Porzellangasse 41, in Vienna’s 9th district, , where their extensive art collection was also housed. This comprised paintings, sculptures and Viennese porcelain, including works by Jan van Goyen, Francesco Guardi and numerous paintings by August Pettenkofen, a dozen of which were on loan to the Pettenkofen exhibition at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1922. In 1923, Josef Honig donated a small painting by Caspar David Friedrich entitled Abendlicher Wolkenhimmel and in 1925 a work entitled Stillleben mit Flasche und Fischen by Herbert Böckl to the Austrian Belvedere Gallery (ÖG). In 1926, a mural group Maria mit dem Jesuskinde made of pear wood was shown in the exhibition entitled Gothic in Austria, organised by the Verein der Museumsfreunde in Vienna, in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. For the Kaiser Franz Joseph exhibition in the Vienna Secession in 1935, Vally Honig lent the paintings Mädchenbildnis mit Pelzmantel by Hans Canon and Emil Jakob Schindler's Buchenwald in Plankenberg. The Honig couple was well acquainted with art dealers and museum experts, such as the curator and later director of the ÖG Bruno Grimschitz and the painter Carl Moll, who gave an Italian landscape to their daughter Gertrud in 1927. Josef Honig died in 1930 and his widow Vally Honig moved to Alserstraße 41, in Vienna’s 8th district in 1937.
After the "Anschluss" of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, Vally Honig and her daughter Gertrud were persecuted by the Nazis as Jews. Gertrud had her 1925 marriage to the lawyer and later NSDAP member Heinrich Siegler-Eberswald dissolved in 1938 and fled to Hungary, where she survived the Nazi era with a false passport. Bruno Grimschitz and Oskar Hamel estimated Vally Honig's art collection, silver, watches and jewelry at a value of over 48,000 Reichsmark as part of the obligatory asset declaration. In the hope of being protected from further persecution, Vally Honig entered into a marriage of convenience with the Norwegian citizen and naval officer Haaken Roald Røren (Roeren), 35 years his junior, in January 1939. Just one day after the civil ceremony, he returned from Vienna to Oslo and was to marry a Norwegian woman in 1944. Vally Roeren successively sold off her art collection: two works by Rudolf von Alt (St. Pölten and Trento) and an Italian landscape (Meeresbucht) by F. G. Waldmüller were sold to unknown parties, Waldmüller's portrait of a gentleman (Portrait of Friedrich Eltz) went to the ÖG via the Wolfrum art dealership. The whereabouts of the rest of the collection, some of which was commissioned, is unclear, as is the fate of her brother Johann Hofmann, born in 1888. On October 4, 1942, Vally Roeren, although she had Norwegian citizenship, was arrested by the Gestapo in front of her house, deported to Maly Trostinec and murdered at an unknown date. The Gestapo presumably commissioned the "Möbelverwertungsstelle Krummbaumgasse" to clear the apartment - as was customary for deportations. The daughter Gertrud Siegler-Eberswald, who tried to track down the art collection after 1945, only received the paintings Wienerwald and Waldweg by Jakob Emil Schindler back in 1947, as well as an unfinished portrait of Vally Honig by Wilhelm Trübner and two Italian landscape paintings by Josef Rebell in 1949.
On 28 June 2006, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the return of the Waldmüller Portrait of Friedrich Eltz from the Austrian Belvedere Gallery to those entitled to restitution after Vally Honig (Roeren). After complex research, the painting was handed over to the legal successor in 2023.