Two thieves leave the Renoir Museum with three paintings and a dropped fourth

Two men broke a glass bay at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer a little before 6 a.m. on Tuesday, cut canvases from their frames, and ran with four paintings. They dropped one in the garden when municipal cameras picked them up. Mayor Bryan Masson said the alarm sounded at 5.48 a.m. and that municipal officers were at the gate by 5.53 a.m. The three works that left the grounds are valued, in his first estimate, at about 9 million euros.

Le Figaro, citing police, said the pair appeared on the recordings slicing pictures from stretchers until the alarm tripped. Nice-Matin reported that they had cut a fence and timed the entry to a change of guard rounds. Investigators later found two zipped bags in the garden that may have belonged to them. Masson did not name the paintings. The museum holds only about ten original Renoir canvases, plus some forty sculptures, the painter's easel, his wheelchair, furniture and a run of photographs and papers.

The house is Les Collettes, Renoir's last home. He bought the farm and olive grove in 1907 and died there in 1919. The town opened it as a museum in 1960. It sits above the old village of Cagnes, west of Nice, and is indexed in France's Mérimée heritage register. The collection is small enough that the loss of three pictures is a large share of what visitors come to see.

The Grasse prosecutor has opened an inquiry in flagrante. National and municipal police remained on the site through the morning. Masson, who sits with the Rassemblement National, called the facts particularly grave. He used Facebook for the first official account, which is why the early wire copy carried small contradictions on whether four works were taken and three escaped, or three were taken from the start. Reuters, the Guardian, CBS and Le Parisien all settled on the same sequence: four lifted, one abandoned in the flight.

The theft lands less than a year after the October 2025 daylight raid at the Louvre, when a group took jewels including the Empress Eugénie tiara, a haul later put at about 88 million euros. Europol said last month that specialist art gangs have given way to looser crews recruited online, and that violence at the scene has risen. Cagnes is not the Louvre. It is a house museum with a glass wall onto a garden. Five minutes was not enough.

France has spent the past year arguing about museum security after the Paris raid. Smaller houses on the Riviera keep original work in the rooms where the painter lived, which is the point of the visit and also the risk. Les Collettes has always traded on that intimacy. The dropped canvas, if it can be restored, will tell restorers how the thieves cut. The three that left will be hard to sell in any public room. That has not stopped previous Riviera thefts from vanishing into private stores for a decade or more.

Cagnes-sur-Mer is a working town of about 52,000 people, not a sealed museum quarter. The domaine sits on a hill among villas. Neighbours heard the alarm. They did not see the men. Until the prosecutor names the pictures, the public only knows that a thin collection just became thinner, and that a fifth-minute response still left three Renoirs in a bag on the road out of town.