Thieves cut four Renoirs from their frames in Cagnes-sur-Mer and drop two in the garden

Two thieves cut four paintings from their frames at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer before 6 a.m. on Tuesday, 8 September. Municipal police reached the house five minutes after the alarm. The pair fled through the gardens and dropped two of the canvases. Mayor Bryan Masson put the value of the four works at 9 million euros.

The alarm sounded at 5:48 a.m. Officers were on the grounds at 5:53 a.m. Masson told reporters the men had entered through a hole in a garden fence and then a broken bay window. On the town’s cameras they appear with a metal saw or electric knife, slicing the pistons that held the frames. Masson called them a commando unit: well informed, well equipped, and fast. Their haste, he said, was their undoing.

Investigators later found two zippered bags in the garden that may have belonged to the suspects. France’s Sub-Directorate for Combating Organised Crime and Specialised Delinquency is running the case. The two men remain at large.

Masson did not name the paintings in official remarks. Nice-Matin reported that the haul included Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano, Coco Lisant and Young Girl at the Well. Those titles match works that sit in the museum’s small permanent collection. The house holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, plus the painter’s easel, wheelchair, furniture and family photographs. Masson said the thieves took four of the twelve paintings on display and abandoned two in the park. Early statements from the town hall spoke of one abandoned canvas. Later briefings settled on two recovered and two still missing.

The museum opened in 1960 in Les Collettes, the last house Renoir bought. He purchased the three-hectare olive estate in 1907 and died there in 1919. The collection is modest by Paris standards. That is part of the problem. A small municipal museum on the Côte d’Azur keeps original Renoirs in a house that was built as a home, not a fortress. The town hall’s own estimate of 9 million euros is a local valuation, not an auction result. Renoir’s most expensive works have sold for tens of millions of dollars. The Cagnes pictures are smaller and later, but they are original and they are gone from a house that cannot easily replace them.

Tuesday’s raid sits in a sequence. In October 2025 thieves took eight items valued at about 100 million dollars from a gilded gallery in the Louvre in daylight. The Musée Lalique in the Bas-Rhin has also reported a break-in involving jewellery worth several million euros. Europol said last month that specialist art gangs have given way to ad hoc crews recruited online, and that robberies at cultural sites have grown more violent. Cagnes-sur-Mer is not Paris. The response time of five minutes shows a town that had cameras and a municipal force ready. It was not enough to stop the cut.

Masson, who sits with Rassemblement National, framed the theft as an attack on the town’s history. That political line will not recover the canvases. What matters for the market and for other small museums is the method: a fence, a window, a saw, four minutes of work, and a run through an olive garden. If two paintings can be dropped in flight and still leave a 9 million euro hole, the remaining collection at Les Collettes is now a known target.

The museum’s inventory is public enough for a determined pair to study in advance. Coco Lisant, painted in 1905, shows Claude Renoir reading. It measures 27.5 by 39.5 centimetres. A compact canvas is easier to carry through a garden than a large bathers scene. That practical fact, more than the mayor’s language about commandos, explains the choice of works.

Police have the video, the bags, the abandoned pictures and the cut hardware. They do not yet have the men or the two paintings that left the grounds. Until those two surfaces reappear, every small French museum that still hangs original Impressionist work on a residential wall has a new timetable to consider: how many minutes it can afford between an alarm and a locked gate.

Cagnes-sur-Mer will reopen the house only after the frames, the window and the fence are rebuilt. The two recovered paintings will go back under tighter mounts. The missing pair will sit on Interpol’s stolen-art lists. The 9 million euro figure is a starting bid for insurance talks, not a closing price. The more durable number is five minutes. That is how long a Riviera town had, and it was not enough.

The house still holds Renoir’s late studio light and the olive trees he painted from the terrace. Those trees did not slow the men. What the raid exposes is a mismatch between the fame of a name and the fabric of a municipal museum. Les Collettes was never designed for a saw at 5:48 a.m. After Tuesday, no curator in a similar house can pretend otherwise.