Bruno Jellinek was co-owner of a banana import company based at Vienna's Nordwestbahnhof (Northwest Railway Station) and owned an art collection of more than 200 works, consisting of watercolours, miniatures and paintings by Modern and Old Masters. A few days after the annexation of Austria to the Nazi German Reich, Bruno Jellinek, who was a Czechoslovak citizen, fled to New York via Prague and Lyon, as his resignation from the Jewish Community and conversion to the Protestant faith in 1901 did not protect him from Nazi persecution. He had previously deposited his art objects with the forwarding company Caro & Jellinek, his brother Josef Jellinek and the restorer Marianne Adler, who worked at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) and later had to emigrate herself. As early as 17 June 1938, the Foreign Currency Investigation Office issued a protective order pursuant to § 24 of the Foreign Currency Ordinance for the country of Austria. Twenty-one paintings and watercolours were blocked for export and placed under the administration of the Central Monument Protection Office; the remaining holdings were initially released. However, by decision of 8 January 1941, the Council Chamber of the Vienna Regional Court declared all of Bruno Jellinek's assets to be forfeited to the German Reich due to offences against the Registration Ordinance. Independently of this, Vugesta began to exploit the Jellinek art collection in the Dorotheum and, due to unclear competences, thus preempted Hans Posse, who in October 1941 was able to acquire only two paintings from that smaller, as yet unsold stock, which was under the administration of the now Institute for Monument Preservation. Several museums in Vienna and Lower Austria, galleries and private individuals, such as the Galerie St. Lucas, demonstrably acquired art objects from the Jellinek Collection at the Dorotheum in 1941/42: the Albertina at least seven miniatures, the KHM two paintings, the Städtische Sammlungen seven miniatures and three watercolours and the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum two paintings. Bruno Jellinek died in New York in 1943. In November 1947, Bruno Jellinek's sister, Johanna Koritschan, who lived in London, filed a restitution claim under the First Restitution Act. Of the 122 miniatures and 84 paintings in Bruno Jellinek's collection, she received back only those nine miniatures and the same number of paintings that were kept in various depots administered by the Federal Monuments Authority (BDA) by decision of the Financial Directorate for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland of 23 September 1948. Eight of Jellinek's works of art had been lost as a result of the war (Städtische Sammlungen: six miniatures and one watercolour, Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum: one painting), two miniatures had been sold by the Albertina in 1949 through the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne.

However, due to the Export Prohibition Act Johanna Koritschan was not allowed to take a miniature by Heinrich Friedrich Füger to London and initially left it with a Viennese friend, Helene Weiss. After Koritschan's death, her daughter sold it to the Städtische Sammlungen Wien in 1963. By decision of the Provincial Court for Civil Law Matters in Vienna, a painting by Josef Danhauser, originally intended for the "Sonderauftrag Linz" and later kept in the Mauerbach Charterhouse, was restituted in accordance with the Determination of Ownership of Works of Art and Cultural Assets Act to Leo Clarence Kelvin (formerly Leopold Clarence Koritschan) as heir to Bruno Jellinek in 1978. Both the Art Restitution Advisory Board (2001, 2007) and the Vienna Restitution Commission (2003, 2010) recommended that the art objects of the collector Bruno Jellinek which were still in the museums at that time and whose complete provenance was not yet known, be handed over to his legal successors. In 2004, the miniature was returned by the Wien Museum, which ultimately bought it back in 2015. The other seizures from the holdings of the Albertina, the KHM and the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum took place in 2007, 2008 and 2014 respectively. Most of the objects from the Jellinek Collection are still considered missing today.