Thieves cut four Renoirs from the painter’s last house and drop two in the garden

Two thieves broke into the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer at dawn on 8 September, cut four paintings from their frames and ran through the garden. The alarm sounded at 5.48 a.m. Police reached the villa by 5.53. The pair got out. They dropped two canvases among the olive trees. Two others left the grounds with them.

Mayor Bryan Masson said the thieves worked like a commando unit and used an electric knife or a metal saw on the frame bolts. Early statements spoke of three works and a €9 million loss. Later he confirmed four taken and two recovered. Still missing are Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano, painted in 1910, and Jeune fille au puits, painted in 1886. Recovered in the garden were Portrait of Madame Pichon, 1895, and Coco Lisant, 1905. Masson said an attack on the museum is an attack on the town's history, and that a Renoir is not an object you sell in a hurry.

The museum is Les Collettes, the farmhouse where Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his last years and where he died in 1919. The town opened it as a museum in 1960. The collection holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Renoir, plus family furniture, his easel and his wheelchair. The rooms are a house first and a gallery second. That is why a five-minute police response still left time to cut canvas from wood.

The Grasse prosecutor opened a flagrante investigation. Municipal cameras recorded the two figures as they fled. Names have not been released. The works that remain missing will go onto stolen-art notices once France files them with the usual channels. A catalogued Renoir from a municipal museum is a hard painting to hang in a selling room. That has not stopped recent European raids. The Louvre jewel theft is not a year old. Smaller churches and local museums have been hit in the same stretch.

Cagnes-sur-Mer sits west of Nice on the Côte d'Azur. The Renoir house is the reason many visitors leave the seafront and climb the hill. Closed rooms and forensic tents will thin that traffic through September. Insurance will cover some of the financial line. It will not cover the two portraits that are now in a bag or a van.

Masson leads a Rassemblement National town hall. His briefings will be part of the local politics. The art fact is separate. Four works were cut. Two came back from the dirt. Two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pictures by the man who lived in the house are gone. The next public update that matters is whether those two surfaces reappear in a search, a dump or a recovery at a border.