Thieves Steal Four Renoir Paintings From French Museum, Drop Two While Fleeing

It took less than five minutes. At 5:48 a.m. on Tuesday, an alarm went off inside the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera. Police arrived within five minutes. By then, two thieves had already cut their way in, grabbed four paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and vanished into the early morning.

According to French regional outlet Nice-Matin, the thieves cut through wire fencing surrounding the museum grounds using an electric knife and a hacksaw, timing their break-in to coincide with a shift change among security staff — the kind of small operational window a well-planned heist is built around.

They took four works: Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon (1895), Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910), Coco Lisant (1905), and Jeune fille au puits (1886). Combined, Nice-Matin reported, the four paintings were worth roughly €9 million — north of $10 million.

Whether from panic, poor planning, or simply moving too fast, the thieves didn't get away clean. Two of the four paintings — Coco Lisant and Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon — were found abandoned in the museum's garden, apparently dropped during the escape.

That leaves two works still missing: Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Jeune fille au puits. French investigators have not announced any arrests, and the identities of the two thieves remain unknown.

The Musée Renoir occupies the artist's final home, the Domaine des Collettes, where Renoir lived and painted until his death in 1919 — a modest, intimate museum rather than a fortress-like institution. That's precisely what makes Tuesday's theft unsettling to French museum security officials: this is the second high-profile art theft in France in under a year, following a brazen daylight raid on the Louvre months earlier that exposed gaps in security at even the country's most heavily guarded museum.

For now, the case sits with French police, who are working to identify the two thieves and, more urgently, to recover the two Renoirs still unaccounted for.

IF Daily could not locate a rights-cleared video specifically of this theft at publication time; the photo above shows the museum building, not the theft itself.