Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund, plans to sell paintings by artists including Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Jean-Honore Fragonard and Max Liebermann that it received as a gift and bequest from a German doctor who devoted his life to helping children in Africa.

Gustav Rau, who died in 2002, built up his collection of about 740 art works over four decades. He donated 621 works to Unicef a year before his death. After years of legal wrangling with Rau’s family and lawyers over his will, Unicef said in a statement yesterday that it received a legal certificate documenting its right of inheritance to the remaining works.

“It’s good that we now have legal security,” Juergen Heraeus, president of the Cologne-based German Unicef committee, said in the statement. “This means the profits can finally be of long-term benefit to those for whom Gustav Rau intended them: the children of the world.”

Rau requested that 153 of the finest paintings and sculptures donated to Unicef should be on public show through 2026, while the rest should be sold. His collection ranged from 15th-century paintings to post-impressionism, taking in masterpieces by Fra Angelico, Lucas Cranach, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Canaletto, Thomas Gainsborough, Gustave Courbet, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Raoul Dufy, El Greco, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Edouard Manet.

Among the paintings to be sold are two Pissarro oils, a Monet, a Liebermann and works by Max Slevogt and Paula Modersohn- Becker, said Helga Kuhn, a spokeswoman for Unicef in Cologne.

Watching Market

Unicef said in the statement that it will consult art-market experts to determine when and how to sell the works. “The foundation doesn’t want to put off selling the art for too long,” the statement said. “On the other hand, we will take account of the situation on the art market.”

The fund said it has reached agreement with the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, near the western German city of Koblenz, on exhibiting 230 of Rau’s paintings next year. It is still looking for an exhibition space for the sculptures, the statement said.

Rau started his career in business, yet decided to sell his parents’ industrial company at the age of 40 to focus on children in need. He trained as a doctor and built a hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo that received Unicef support.

His lifestyle was frugal; his only luxury was collecting art, and he traveled to auctions in Paris, London and New York. Relatives and his lawyers fought his bequest to Unicef in court, arguing that ill health had diminished his ability to conduct his own affairs. A court in Konstanz, Germany, rejected the final complaints against his bequest in August.