Two thieves cut four Renoirs from the painter’s last house

Two thieves broke into the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer at dawn on Tuesday, 8 September, and cut four paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from their frames. The museum alarm sounded at 5:48 a.m. Municipal police reached the site at 5:53 a.m. The pair had already gone. They dropped two canvases in the garden as they ran. Two works remain missing.

Mayor Bryan Masson said the thieves worked like a commando unit. They used an electric knife or a metal saw on the bolts that held the frames. Town cameras caught them. 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 leading the case. The two suspects are still at large.

BBC News, citing the mayor, named the missing pictures as Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910) and Jeune fille au puits (1886). The recovered works are Portrait of Madame Pichon (1895) and Coco Lisant (1905). Early statements had spoken of three stolen pieces. Later briefings settled on four taken and two recovered. Masson put the value of the works at €9 million, about $10.4 million or £7.7 million. He also told reporters that a Renoir cannot be sold in the open market in any simple way.

The museum opened in 1960 inside Les Collettes, the last house Renoir occupied before his death in 1919. It sits among olive trees above the town, west of Nice in the Alpes-Maritimes. The permanent collection holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Renoir, plus furniture that belonged to the family, including his easel and wheelchair. Coco Lisant is a 1905 oil of Claude Renoir, the painter’s son, measuring 27.5 by 39.5 centimetres.

Masson called the break-in an attack on a part of the town’s history. The house is listed in France’s Mérimée architectural database. Response time was short. Five minutes was not short enough. The thieves had already cut the canvases and reached the garden.

The theft sits in a longer European run. Eight items valued at about $100 million were taken from the Louvre in Paris less than a year ago in a daylight raid. Four Renaissance paintings were stolen from a museum in Sicily last month. French regional museums have also reported jewellery thefts. Small sites with thin night staff and famous names have become a pattern.

Renoirs of this class do not move easily through auction houses. The more likely path is a private buyer who never shows the work, or a later attempt to ransom the pictures back. The two recovered canvases reduce the haul. The two that left the garden are now the police problem. Until those two surfaces reappear, the last house Renoir lived in is a crime scene as well as a museum.