Gustav Rau (art collector)

The collection contains outstanding paintings from the 14th century to modernism, including El Greco's Saint Dominic at Prayer, Auguste Renoir's Lady with a Rose, Camille Pissarro's Portrait of Jeanne and Paul Cézanne's La mer à l’estaque, a still-life flower painting by Odilon Redon, Canaletto's St Mark's Square, works by Cranach, The Beheading of Goliath by David (1606–07), an early Guido Reni, paintings by Giandomenico Tiepolo, François Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edvard Munch, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Max Liebermann, early Italian panel paintings and other Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque paintings.

The collection grew in an underground vault at Zürich Airport out of public view but under the watchful eye of the Swiss authorities.

Early in 2014 The Self-Assured Algerian by Jean-Baptiste Corot and View of the Hermitage by Pissarro were sold for a total of 16 million Euros, again to raise money for UNICEF, though the sale was criticised since these two works were from the core collection, which was supposed to be kept together until 2026.

In 2013 controversy arose when it was discovered that the art donated to Unicef included a painting by Paul Cézanne that had been looted by the Nazis from its former Jewish owners during the German occupation of France in World War II.

[2] In 2000 French courts ordered the seizure of Cézanne's “The sea at l’Estaque” which was part of the “From Fra Angelico to Bonnard: masterpieces from the Rau Collection” exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg because of a claim that it had been looted by Nazis from the gallery owner Josse Bernheim-Jeune[3]