Alfred Leimdörfer, son of the community doctor Leopold Leimdörfer and Rosa, neé Kohn, completed his medical studies at Vienna University in 1910 and qualified as a professor of internal medicine in 1926. In 1918, Alfred Leimdörfer married Marianne Jellenik, a native of Brünn/Brno, and in 1930 their daughter Fritzi Edith was born. As an internist at the former Archduke Rainer Hospital (now the Hanusch Hospital), he wrote 19 medical treatises on the subjects of metabolism and blood circulation. He was a member of the Society of Physicians in Vienna and the Biological Society in Vienna and lectured at the Faculty of Medicine.

With the annexation of Austria to the Nazi German Reich on 12 March 1938, the family was considered “Jewish”. The University of Vienna revoked his teaching licence, the Archduke Rainer Hospital suspended his employment in March 1938 and dismissed Alfred Leimdörfer in December of the same year. At the end of 1939, the Leimdörfer family was able to find an American citizen, Isidore Diamond, who guaranteed their financial security in the USA. On 8 January 1940, Alfred Leimdörfer submitted an application for the export of 21 oil paintings and 4 etchings, which he had not listed in his property declaration of 14 July 1938. With the exception of the painting “1 oil/wood, Romako sign. Boy with cow – withheld [1 Öl/Holz, Romako sign. Knabe mit Kuh – zurückgehalten]”, the Central Monument Protection Office granted permission for export. However, after Alfred, Marianne and Fritzi Edith Leimdörfer left Vienna in March 1940, the Vienna Gestapo confiscated their removal goods on the basis of the seizure order of 11 November 1941 in favour of the German Reich and transferred them to the Vugesta for realisation. The retained painting by Anton Romako, Knabe mit Kuh im Hochwald, was not auctioned until 1943 via the Dorotheum.

In September 1941, after having lived in New York, the Leimdörfer family moved in to Atlanta, Georgia, where Alfred Leimdörfer held a medical professorship at the private Oglethorpe University and Marianne Leimdörfer worked for Artistic Mfg. Co. In 1945, the family obtained American citizenship and relocated to Chicago, Illinois in September. Alfred Leimdörfer, who in the meantime had acquired an outstanding reputation in medical research, changed employers and joined the medical faculty of Loyola University in Chicago as professor of pulmonary diseases. Fritzi Leimdörfer completed her schooling at Hyde Park High School in 1948 and married Philip Marcus Demsetz, who came from a Russian-Austrian family, in 1953. The marriage produced two daughters. Alfred Leimdörfer died in 1956, his widow in 1990.

At no time after 1945 did the Leimdörfer couple or their daughter Fritzi Demsetz initiate restitution proceedings before an Austrian court regarding their seized assets. From 1949 onwards, the nephews, Fritz and Karl Fabian, sons of Alfred Leimdörfer's sister Elsa Fabian, who died in Theresienstadt/Terezin in 1942, conducted a total of nine restitution proceedings before the Restitution Commission at the Regional Court for Civil Matters in Vienna for their mother's one-third share of the Leimdörfer family's seized properties in Hohenau an der March, Lower Austria. Alfred Leimdörfer's shares remained unclaimed and the Collection Agencies A and B, which were established in 1957, did not initiate restitution proceedings in this regard either. Ownership of Alfred Leimdörfer's one-third share remained with the respective owners. From June 1945, the Federal Monuments Authority compiled a photo register of expropriated art objects, in which it included objects that had been stored in the depot of the Central Monument Protection Office in the Neue Hofburg between 1938 and 1945. Among them is a photograph of the painting by Anton Romako under no. P 462 with the designation Mann m. Kuh in Ldschft. (Landscape with Man and Cow) and the provenance “Slg. (Collection) Dr. Leindörfer”. It didn’t reappear until 1950, when the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz (now the Lentos Museum) and its director Wolfgang Gurlitt loaned it to the Österreichische Galerie for its memorial exhibition on Anton Romako at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1952, Wolfgang Gurlitt sold the work to the Lower Austrian Provincial Museum via the Schebesta Gallery. It is still part of the Lower Austrian State Collections today and has been identified by provenance research as a potential restitution case; a restitution decision and return are still pending.