Another Art Heist Rocks France – This Time, It’s Renoir
At a Glance
- Two thieves broke into the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer before dawn on Tuesday
- Four paintings taken; two abandoned in the garden during a police chase
- Stolen works belong to the Musée d’Orsay and were on loan
- Comes less than a year after the €88 million Louvre jewel heist
Museum burglary rattles the French Riviera, reviving fears over weak security at the country’s cultural sites.
Thieves cut a hole in a garden fence and slipped through a window just before 6 a.m. on Tuesday, making off with two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir before police could stop them.
The stolen canvases, “Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well,” belong to Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and were on loan to the Renoir Museum. Two more works, “Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading,” were dropped in the garden as alarms triggered a police chase, according to Mayor Bryan Masson and the Marseille prosecutor’s office. A gang-theft investigation is now underway.
Why it matters
Renoir’s paintings have sold for tens of millions at auction, but Masson called them essentially unsellable: “priceless, you cannot sell them just like that.” A 2024 culture ministry survey found only one in four French museums had an emergency plan, and nearly half had no video surveillance at all. Europol says opportunistic, socially-recruited gangs are increasingly targeting museums across Europe, with last year’s Louvre jewel theft the starkest example.
Investigators are hunting the thieves, and pressure is mounting on Paris to tighten museum security nationwide.
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Source: Reuters
