Two people entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-Sur-Mer, a small town in southern France, early Tuesday and stole three artworks, the authorities said.
The police rushed to the museum and arrived five minutes after the alarm rang, according to a statement from the Town Hall on social media. The two thieves, caught on surveillance camera, initially stole four pieces but dropped a painting as they escaped, the statement said.
The brazen theft occurred almost exactly a year after thieves broke into one of the Louvre museum’s gilded galleries and stole royal jewels worth over $100 million — the most striking in a series of recent thefts from cultural and religious sites in France.
“Attacking the Renoir Museum amounts to attacking part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and heritage,” Bryan Masson, the mayor, said on social media. The theft, he added, is “particularly serious” and reveals the need for “a comprehensive plan to secure our museums and protect our works of art.”
The Town Hall did not specify which artworks were stolen, but the museum’s permanent collection holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Pierre August Renoir, the leading Impressionist painter, as well as furniture that belonged to his family, and photographs.
The authorities said the museum was closed until further notice.
France has been the site of numerous recent art thefts as European cultural sites struggle to keep their precious objects safe.
Other thefts in France have included nuggets of raw gold worth about $700,000 taken from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, dishes worth $11 million from a museum in a city known for its porcelain, and 100 Huguenot golden crosses stolen from a small museum.
In July, the Princess of Vix’s gold torque — “a 2,500-year-old masterpiece of Celtic goldsmithing,” according to the French culture ministry — was stolen in broad daylight from a museum in the Burgundy region.
Days later, the French culture ministry announced a broad plan to address what it described as “increasingly organized, swift and determined” thefts. The plan, aimed at fostering a stronger culture of security within cultural institutions, includes 33 measures, such as mapping out the most vulnerable sites, recruiting specialized police officers and extra security for pieces considered at risk.
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