Two thieves broke into a museum housing works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir on the French Riviera in the pre-dawn hours and left with two paintings after abandoning two others as they fled the scene.
The intruders entered the museum gardens by cutting through a perimeter fence, triggering the alarm at 5:48 a.m. local time. Officers arrived approximately five minutes later. The tools used included an electric knife and a hacksaw. Inside the building, the thieves cut clips securing four artwork frames and removed the pieces before departing.
The four works taken were Portrait of Madame Pichon (1895), Coco Reading (1905), Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910), and Young Woman at the Well (1886). The two paintings still missing are Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Young Woman at the Well; both had been on loan to the Musée Renoir from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The two dropped in the garden during the getaway — Portrait of Madame Pichon and Coco Reading, a portrayal of Renoir’s young son Claude — have been recovered.
The estimated value of the stolen art is €9 million, roughly £7.7 million or $10.5 million. Bryan Masson, mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer and a member of the far-right National Rally, holds jurisdiction over the museum, which occupies Renoir’s former home. The event is being investigated as a burglary of high-value cultural property.
The theft is the latest in a string of European museum burglaries in recent months. In March, four masked men broke into a museum near the Italian city of Parma and took the Renoir painting Les Poissons, valued at approximately three million euros; the work was recovered last month.
