Thieves recently targeted the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, making off with four valuable paintings in a daring heist. However, their plans were thwarted as they dropped two of the paintings in the museum gardens while fleeing from the police who had been alerted by the alarm system early on Tuesday.
The stolen artworks, attributed to the renowned impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, have commanded significant sums at auction houses, with some fetching tens of millions of dollars. According to Mayor Bryan Masson, the thieves gained access to the museum by breaching a hole in a garden fence shortly before 6 a.m. to seize the four paintings. This incident adds to a series of bold art thefts occurring in the country.
Masson emphasized the gravity of the situation, stating that attacking the Renoir Museum equates to attacking a vital part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and heritage. The museum, established in 1960 within the artist’s former mansion where he passed away in 1919, showcases a collection of 13 paintings by Renoir, along with approximately 40 sculptures, furniture pieces, and photographs.
Among the stolen pieces were noted works such as “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano,” “Coco Lisant,” and “Young Girl at the Well,” as reported by the local Nice-Matin newspaper. Masson refrained from disclosing the specific identities of the stolen paintings.
The recent theft at the Renoir Museum follows a trend of increasingly violent art robberies in Europe, with Europol highlighting a shift from organized gangs to ad hoc criminals recruited online through social media platforms. This development echoes the heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year, where thieves menaced guards and visitors, making off with jewels valued at €88 million ($141.5 million Cdn), including Empress Eugenie’s tiara.
