Adella Taubmann arrived in Vienna in the 1920s, where she married the businessman Max Feuer in 1927, divorcing him in 1934. A few years later, after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, she was preparing her escape from Nazi persecution as a Jew and sought permission from the Zentralstelle für Denkmalschutz (Central Monument Protection Authority) to export her artworks – oil paintings, pastels, watercolours and prints. She sold one drawing by an anonymous artist that was not approved for export to the Albertina. She was registered as having left for the USA in April 1939. Together with her partner Hermann Herlinger, however, she only got as far as Milan. The couple were interned in Italy – Feuer in the women's camp in Pollenza, Herlinger in Fossoli transit camp – and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Herlinger perished. After her liberation from Malchow, a satellite camp of Ravensbrück, Feuer returned initially to Italy and emigrated in 1947 to her brother Jakob in the USA, where she took her mother's maiden name and became Ada Imberman.

In March 2013, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution from the Albertina of the drawing by the anonymous artist.