Raoul Albert La Roche

Raoul Albert La Roche (23 February 1889 - 15 June 1965) was a Swiss banker and art collector. He was especially interested in purism and cubism and his collections have been donated to museums in Switzerland and France. His home in Paris, Maison La Roche, was designed by his friend Le Corbusier and now houses the Le Corbusier Foundation. Early life Raoul Albert La Roche was born on 23 February 1889, and grew up in Basel, Switzerland in a bourgeois family, very closely linked to the world of art. He was the second son of the banker Louis La Roche and Emilie Caroline Burckhardt. He studied at the School of Trading in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), and became an apprentice in the Bank of Basel, and worked in Berlin and London. Career In 1912, at the age of 23, La Roche moved to Paris to work for the (BSF), which became in 1917 the . He made his career there, retiring in 1954. In 1940, during the invasion of France by the German army, he left Paris and moved to Lyon, keeping his job at the bank, until the end of the war. He returned to Paris after the war.