After obtaining his doctorate in law at the University of Vienna in 1906, Armin Reichmann worked as a journalist for the Österreichische Volkszeitung, Morgen and Berliner Börsen-Courier. He lived with his wife Rosa, née Mühlendorf (born 1888 in Stare Sioło, Galicia) and their children Erika (born 1912) and Kurt (born 1917) at Pfluggasse 4 in Vienna's 9th district, before moving in 1923 to Garnisongasse 6. Following the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, Reichmann was dismissed on 1 May 1938 from the Österreichische Volkszeitung on account of his Jewish origins. The Prager Tagblatt, for which he had worked occasionally as a Vienna correspondent, also ended its relationship with him. In his asset declaration he listed a library as well as a small collection of paintings and drawings, but the cursory descriptions – with the exception of a watercolour by Anton Romako – make further identification impossible. In April 1941, shortly before the Reichmanns were forced to move to the bel étage of their apartment building in Garnisongasse, which had been turned into a "Sammelwohnung" (collective apartment), the assessor Alois Getzinger drew up a new inventory of the contents of the apartment, with a much smaller art collection than had been listed in the asset declaration three years earlier. After the "emigration department" of the Vienna Jewish Community (IKG) questioned the credibility of Reichmann's assertion that he could not afford to pay the ship's passage to the USA himself and therefore refused to offer him financial support, he and Rosa Reichmann were deported on 2 June 1942 with 998 other Jews to Minsk and murdered a few days later in Maly Trostinec.

Although the Jewish Community "emigration department" also refused to subsidize the travel costs of Reichmann's daughter, Erika Reichmann, who was about to be awarded her doctorate in law, she managed to flee to Britain. Her brother Kurt, who had abandoned his law studies in 1937 in favour of training with the Zionist HeHalutz organization on a farm in Latvia, did not return to Vienna and settled after the war in Palestine. In 2012 the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution of the drawing by Romako, which had ended up via Galerie Welz in the Albertina, to Armin Reichmann's legal successors.