Christopher Tostrup Paus, Count of Paus was a Norwegian landowner, heir to the timber firm Tostrup & Mathiesen, papal chamberlain and count, known as philanthropist, art collector and socialite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He inherited a fortune from his grandfather, timber magnate Christopher Tostrup, and lived for decades in Rome; in 1923 he bought the estate Herresta in Sweden which is still owned by descendants of his cousin Herman Paus who was married to a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. He gave large donations to museums in Scandinavia and to the Catholic Church, notably the Paus collection of classical sculpture that now forms part of the National Museum of Norway. Paus was considered "the founder of the National Gallery's antiquities collection" by Harry Fett. A convert to Catholicism, he was appointed as a papal chamberlain by Pope Benedict XV in 1921 and conferred the title of count by Pope Pius XI in 1923. He was the recipient of numerous papal and Scandinavian honours. He was a first cousin once removed of playwright Henrik Ibsen and was the only Ibsen relative to visit Ibsen during his decades-long exile when he wrote his most famous works.

The Paus collection is a collection of classical sculpture that mostly forms part of the National Museum of Norway, and previously of its predecessor, the National Gallery. The collection was created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by papal chamberlain and count Christopher Tostrup Paus, who lived in Rome at the time; it was moved to his Swedish estate Trystorp during the First World War and later partly to his estate Herresta. At the time it was mostly possible to export antique objects from Italy. Previously the largest private collection of classical sculpture in the Nordic countries, it was largely donated to the Norwegian government by Paus between 1918 and 1929 as the intended foundation of a Norwegian museum or department of classical sculpture. Some objects from the Paus collection were also acquired by other museums, including Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.