By Manon Cruz and Inti Landauro
CAGNES-SUR-MER, France, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Two thieves stole two Renoir paintings from a museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera on Tuesday after breaking in shortly before 6 a.m. through a hole cut in a garden fence and entering through a window, local authorities said.
The stolen paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose most valuable works have fetched dozens of millions of dollars at auctions, were “Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well”. Both belong to Paris’ famous Orsay Museum and were on loan to the museum.
The thieves had taken two more paintings “Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading”, a portrayal of Claude, the young son of the famous Impressionist artist, but dropped them in the gardens as police, alerted by alarms, arrived and gave chase, local Mayor Bryan Masson and the Marseille prosecutor’s office said.
Masson said of the paintings, “they are priceless, you cannot sell them just like that.”
The Marseille prosecutor added an investigation had been opened into theft by an organised gang.
The museum, set up in 1960 in Renoir’s mansion on a hill near Nice where he died in 1919, had 13 paintings by the master on display and some 40 sculptures, items of furniture and photographs.
Masson, a member of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, called for greater security for museums around France.
“This incident should serve as a wake-up call about the protection of our museums, which are now facing a new form of crime targeting works of art,” he said.
The French government has come under pressure to tackle dramatic failures in the security of the country’s museums.
A French parliamentary report this summer said museums lacked resources and were ill-prepared to ensure the safekeeping of precious artworks and cultural artefacts.
A culture ministry survey in 2024 found that only one in four institutions had an emergency and risk prevention plan and nearly half lacked any video surveillance.
Art thieves in Europe are committing more violent robberies and specialist gangs have been replaced by ad hoc opportunists recruited through social media, pan-European police body Europol said last month.
It cited as a prime example a heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris in October last year, when thieves stole €88 million ($102 million) worth of jewels. Other French museums were also targeted in the past months.
“They are attacking all museums now, we must react,” Luc, a neighbour of the Renoir museum, told BFM TV. He was woken up very early by police arriving at the spot of the break-in. “It’s very isolated here,” he said.
($1=0.8605 euros)
(Writing by Inti Landauro, Ingrid Melander, and Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Alex Richardson, Clarence Fernandez and Alexandra Hudson)
