Marianne Schmidl, one of the first women ethnologists in Vienna, worked as an intern at the Vienna Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art while still a student. After her doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1915, she worked initially in the Africa Department of the Geography and Ethnology Museum in Berlin, then at the Lindenmuseum in Stuttgart. In 1921 she returned to Vienna, where she worked from 1922 at the National Library as a specialist in folk life, science and medicine. She continued her ethnology studies and was also a member of the Anthropologische Gesellschaft and Verein für Österreichische Volkskunde. In September 1938 she was retired as a result of the repression of Jewish public servants. The payment of the Judenvermögensabgabe (Jewish Asset Levy), which she could no longer afford, was demanded of her "Aryan" brother-in-law Karl Wolf. In early 1939, Otto Reche, former head of the Staatlich-sächsisches Forschungsinstitut (Saxony State Research Institute) in Leipzig, also demanded repayment of the money Schmidl had received since 1927 for her research into African basketware. To pay these demands, she decided to sell the artworks she had inherited from her mother Maria Schmidl, most of which came from her great-grandfather, the painter Friedrich von Olivier. Through the Vienna art dealer Christian M. Nebehay and with the aid of her brother-in-law, twenty-five drawings were made available to the Leipzig antiques dealership C. G. Boerner, which sold them at an auction on 28 April 1939. They included works by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the brothers Ferdinand and Friedrich von Olivier, which were acquired, among others, by the Albertina and various German museums. Marianne Schmidl was deported in April 1942 to the ghetto in Izbica, Poland, and murdered there. Her share in the house in Wolfgangsgasse, Vienna, which she co-owned with her brother-in-law, was expropriated by the Nazi authorities under the Elfte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz (11th Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law) of 25 November 1941. It was restituted after the war to her two nieces. In March 2013, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution of the two sheets in the Albertina. Further items were restored from the Kupferstichkabinett departments in Berlin and Dresden, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich and from the National Gallery of Art in Washington.