Art is always a mirror of its time. And the pictures of Emil Rau met (and meet) a deep need of many people: In the background the bluish mountain ranges of the Alps, in the foreground a dashing girl with rosy cheeks in a dirndl, three farmers in traditional costume greeting each other and chatting in a relaxed manner, in the midst of Alpine meadows, alpine pastures or in rustic (but spotless) farmhouses. Bavarian cultural landscape, joie de vivre, original rural community, clean and rosy and idyllic, often with the patina of oversized poetry album or decals.

Emil Rau was very successful with his Bavarian-influenced genre painting. Genre painting depicts folk scenes of everyday life, highlighting customs, costumes and traditions, usually of certain groups of the population and professions. Genre paintings existed in ancient times, for example on Greek vases and on murals in Egypt. Also known are the masterful Dutch genre paintings, for example with crude tavern scenes. The extent to which these scenes were truly realistic or did not rather emphasize certain features excessively remains to be seen. From the end of the 18th century, genre painting developed for every conceivable everyday subject: themes included driven hunt scenes, working days in a shoemaker's workshop or at the apothecary's, country weddings, washerwomen at the river, and so on. Already proverbially famous are Franz Carl Spitzweg's oil paintings, in which he depicts scenes and portraits in the petty bourgeois milieu with sympathy, humor and attention to detail. In the 19th century, a large audience for genre paintings emerged: an increasingly numerous bourgeois class could and wanted to embellish their homes with paintings, and the popular magazines that published serial novels, guidebooks, and entertainment texts of all kinds also liked to illustrate their articles with genre paintings, often simple wood engravings, but with increasingly simple printing processes also colored lithographs. Emil Rau painted for this audience. His illustrations appeared in the youth magazine "Jugendlust", the family magazine "Gartenlaube" or in the "Fliegende Blätter", a weekly magazine with satires, caricatures, poems and stories about the German bourgeoisie (the "Biedermann", for example, is one of its inventions), to which Wilhelm Busch, among others, contributed illustrations. And Emil Rau's numerous oil paintings, almost exclusively portraits and scenes from the Alpine country, still find their audience today - and their price, because an "original Rau" can hardly be had for less than 2,000 euros today.

Rau was born in Dresden in 1858. He did not take over the long-established lithographic workshop of his grandfather and father (both were court lithographers, i.e. worked for the Saxon court), but enrolled in 1875 at the Dresden Art Academy under Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Wilhelm Pauwels, among others, and in 1879 moved to Munich to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Alexander Wagner and Wilhelm Lindenschmit the Younger, among others. From 1883 Rau worked as a freelance illustrator and painter in Munich, apart from a two-year stay in Dresden from 1882 to 1884. In Munich he married Annamaria Dietzer from the Bavarian village of Oberstreu in 1886; the two had four sons. Emil Rau died in 1937.