Two of four Renoir paintings stolen from the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer were abandoned in the garden as the thieves fled, turning a fast-moving museum theft into a partial recovery within minutes. The alarm sounded at 05:48 local time on Tuesday, police arrived five minutes later, and the pair who took the works have not been caught.
The theft has already been put at €9m, or about £7.7m and $10.5m, and it landed on the French Riviera only months after last October’s heist at the Louvre in Paris, where jewellery worth €88m was taken. That earlier raid has become a reference point for museum security across France, and art detective Arthur Brand said recent thefts across Europe were copycats, adding that thieves watching the Louvre would be thinking about what they could take from local museums.
The paintings reported stolen were Portrait of Madame Pichon, from 1895, Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano, from 1910, Coco Lisant, from 1905, and Jeune fille au puits, from 1886. Two of them were left behind in the garden, but it is not known which two. That detail matters because authorities initially believed only one painting had been abandoned, before the mayor said two had been found there.
What is clear is that the thieves did not get away cleanly. Four works were removed, two were dropped during the escape, and the missing pair remain missing. The gap in the account is now narrower, not wider: investigators know part of the haul was recovered almost immediately, but the paintings still in the thieves’ hands, and the route they used to get in and out, remain unknown.
Brand said the Louvre theft has already pushed museums into a fresh round of security checks, with meetings taking place between staff and police. For the Musée Renoir, the immediate question is whether the theft was a rehearsal for something larger or simply a brazen strike that happened to leave a trail in the garden. Either way, the thieves are still free, and the two Renoirs they carried off are still missing.
