Smithsonian Magazine · People & society

Four Renoir Paintings Stolen from French Museum

Thieves broke into the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, and stole four paintings by the Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, valued at over $2.5 million.

The burglars used a tool to cut through the frames of the paintings. Police intervention and the museum's alarms caused the thieves to rush, and they only managed to steal four of the twelve works present. Two of the stolen paintings, "Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon" and "Coco Reading," were abandoned in the museum gardens while the thieves fled from authorities. The other two, "Madame Colonna Romano" (valued over $2.3 million) and "Young Woman at the Well" (valued about $230,000), remain missing.

The stolen artworks were on loan to the museum from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Authorities attribute the partial success of the theft to the museum's security system and the rapid response of local police, who arrived at the scene just five minutes after the alarm was triggered.

Renoir, a founding artist of Impressionism, spent the last decade of his life at the estate in Cagnes-sur-Mer, which was later converted into a museum displaying his personal belongings and artworks. The museum holds 13 original paintings and about 40 sculptures.

This incident is part of a recent increase in art thefts across Europe, including a heist at the Louvre and another in Italy involving works by Renoir, Matisse, and Cézanne.

Local officials are calling for increased government support to help museums protect art from what they describe as increasingly organized and determined criminals.

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