The Viennese banker and art collector Wilhelm König was the only child of the first violinist and concertmaster of the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra Josef (Joseph) König and his wife Helene, née Pollak. By the early 1920s, he already had an extremely extensive collection that included 200 oil paintings and sketches from various masters and movements as well as several sculptures and around 3,000 hand drawings and watercolours from the 15th century to the present day. Wilhelm König marked his works with a collector's stamp: WSK, surrounded by a circle, whereby the larger, protruding letter S between his – smaller – initials stands for collection [Collection = Sammlung]. He also had a considerable library of allegedly 5,000 volumes. In January 1925, he had 882 items (drawings from the 17th to 20th centuries) auctioned through the Berlin antiquarian bookshop Paul Graupe. Permission to export and sell the works in Germany was granted with the approval of the Federal Monuments Authority and the Albertina. More than a year later, in October 1926, part of the König collection was again auctioned at the Dorotheum in Vienna. The following year, the collector Johann Török acquired a larger bundle of König's artworks. Török took the sheets with him to the USA, where the distribution of works from the König collection continued through further auctions. Despite these sales, the König collection was still considerable.

Immediately after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, Wilhelm König left Vienna with his wife Marianne. On 19 March 1938, they fled by night train, initially to neighbouring Switzerland. That same night, the Gestapo sealed their apartment at Garnisongasse 6/12 in Vienna's ninth district, as well as Wilhelm's country house in Vienna 19. On 22 August 1938, the inventory remaining in Vienna was transferred to the Vienna Dorotheum by the office of the Nazi deputy mayor and later city councillor Thomas Kozich with the note “Forced sale due to Reich flight of Wilhelm König, Vienna IX, Garnisongasse 6/12” and put up for auction between August 1938 and September 1939 under the consignment numbers 44.542 and 44.543. In addition to furnishings and everyday objects, there were also a few works of art, mainly paintings. The Dorotheum also auctioned off part of the library, with the exception of 147 books handed over to the Gestapo and those items (old journals, address books, etc.) that had been taken out of circulation without remuneration. In the meantime, the König couple continued their escape and reached Sweden via France in 1939. They returned to Vienna in March 1949, and in the same year Wilhelm König made efforts to have the property in the 19th district restituted; at least some of the inventory (works of art and furniture) was returned to him. After his death in 1955, Marianne König applied to the Austrian and German authorities for compensation.

To date, nine works from the former Wilhelm König Collection, all of which bear the collector's stamp, have been identified in the Albertina's holdings. As the works entered the Albertina's collection in different ways in the period between 1938 and 2012, the assessment by the Art Restitution Advisory Board was also differentiated. At its meeting on 27 September 2024, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the return of the three works acquired between 1938 and 1944. For six objects, however, it was possible to prove directly or indirectly that they had already been removed from Wilhelm König's collection as a result of the sales he had made in the 1920s.