Gustav Rau (art collector)
Gustav Rau (21 January 1922 - 3 January 2002) was a German doctor, philanthropist and art collector. Rau who was born and died in Stuttgart.
Foundations
Art collector
In 1958 Rau bought his first old master, The Cook by Gerard Dou. He attended auctions in London, Paris and New York. By 1997 he had collected 700 paintings, sculptures and craft works. It 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. He made loans from the collection to international exhibitions, mostly credited as "from a Swiss private collection". However, the quality and scope of the collection remained mysterious until a major exhibition in Paris in 2001. The collection is valued between 500 and 750 million Euros. Eight works from the collection were auctioned at Sotheby's in London in 2008 for a total of £6.2 million - a triptych by Taddeo di Bartolo valued at £300,000 sold for £1.9 million and one of Tintoretto's self-portraits for the then record price of £1.6 million. The Foundation raised 43 million Euros for Unicef by selling some works from the collection in 2013. 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.
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