Thieves cut paintings from the Renoir museum and drop one in the garden

Two people broke into the Musée Renoir at Les Collettes, the last home of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, before dawn on Tuesday, 8 September. They took four paintings. City cameras tracked them as they fled. One canvas was abandoned in the grounds. Mayor Bryan Masson later said two of the four works had been recovered. He put the value of the stolen group at €9 million.

The museum alarm sounded at 5:48 a.m. Municipal police reached the site at 5:53 a.m., five minutes later. The pair were already gone. Le Figaro, citing police, said they entered by breaking a glass bay and were filmed cutting canvases from their supports until the alarm tripped. Investigators found two zip bags in the garden that may have belonged to them. Nice-Matin reported that they cut a fence and timed the gap between guard rounds.

Which works were targeted

Masson did not name the pictures in his first statement. France Télévisions later identified the painting found in the garden as Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon. The other three works named in that reporting were Madame Colonna Romano, Young Woman at the Well, and Coco Reading. The museum holds a tight original group: about ten Renoir paintings, around forty sculptures, the painter’s furniture, his easel, his wheelchair, photographs and papers. It opened in 1960 inside the house where Renoir died in 1919.

The Grasse prosecutor opened a flagrante investigation. Two suspects remain at large. Masson, who sits for Rassemblement National, called the raid a serious strike on the town’s history and said it confirmed his plan to harden museum security. He said the works belong to the people of Cagnes.

A small collection in a house, not a fortress

Les Collettes is a hillside estate above the town, not a purpose-built vault. The collection is small enough that the loss of even three canvases would thin the rooms visitors come to see. The thieves treated the pictures as portable objects: cut from frames, stuffed toward bags, one dropped under pressure from cameras and a five-minute police response. Recovery of two works reduces the hole. It does not answer how a house museum with original furniture and a limited hanging list was entered through glass and a cut fence.

French coverage placed the raid in a line of recent museum thefts, including the still-open wound of the Louvre jewellery raid. Masson used that climate to argue for a full security plan. The operational facts on Tuesday morning were simpler. Two people, four pictures, an alarm at 5:48, police at 5:53, bags in the garden, one canvas left in the grass, two later recovered, two still missing if the mayor’s later count holds, and a €9 million figure that has not been broken down picture by picture.

Until the prosecutor names the works in an official inventory, the France Télévisions list is the most specific public account of what left the walls. The house itself, and the remaining originals, are now a crime scene as well as a museum.