Thaw's collection included drawings from modern and old masters, American Indian art, ancient Eurasian bronzes, early medieval jewelry, Native American art, architectural models, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil sketches, French faience, in addition to paintings, sculpture, and furniture.
[7] He was the owner of drawings and paintings by Paul Cézanne, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Alberto Giacometti, Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock, Odilon Redon, Rembrandt, as well as Native American art.
[4] In 1985 and 1986 a group of small format paintings from the Thaw collection was exhibited at The Pierpont Morgan Library and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts alongside drawings, bronzes, objets de vertu and faience, to present an idea of their additional interests as collectors.
[8] In 2008, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum held an exhibition titled "House Proud", that commemorated a substantial gift made by Eugene and Clare Thaw of eighty five nineteenth-century exquisitely detailed watercolors of domestic interiors, the largest collection of this subject matter in America.
[11] In 2021 the estate of Eugene Thaw reached a settlement agreement with the heirs of Margarete Eisenmann concerning the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Resurrection.
Thaw bought it around 1968 after the Cranach had passed through the hands of New York dealers Hugo Perls and the Knoedler gallery.