It was 5:48 a.m. on Tuesday when a security alarm started blaring in a charming stone villa surrounded by olive trees in Cagnes-Sur-Mer, a town in southern France.
When the police arrived five minutes later, the authorities said, they narrowly missed two thieves who had broken into the building, a former home of the Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir that has since become a museum.
The thieves fled the museum with four paintings, the authorities said, but as they scrambled to escape through the garden, they left two of the works behind.
It was the latest high-profile art theft in Europe as the continent’s cultural sites struggle to keep their precious objects safe.
The thieves “were well-informed, they were well equipped,” the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Bryan Masson, told reporters on Tuesday. “They did it very quickly and very well.”
Although he added that “their haste was their undoing,” the robbers still managed to get away with two prized works. (The authorities had said earlier that the pair made off with three pieces.) The mayor’s office said the stolen works were a portrait the French actress of Colonna Romano, painted around 1910, and “Young Woman at the Well,” an oil painting from around 1886.
The museum’s permanent collection holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Renoir, as well as furniture that belonged to his family, and photographs.
Masson said the thieves had acted like “a commando unit,” using “an electric knife” or “a metal saw” to cut through the bolts that held the paintings’ frames.
The brazen theft occurred almost 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.
Two recent parliamentary inquiries highlighted that France was ill-prepared to ensure the security of its artworks. The culture ministry’s annual survey of museums in 2024, for example, showed that only 23 percent of the 616 organizations examined had an emergency and risk prevention plan and that almost half had no video surveillance system.
The culture ministry published a plan in July, attempting to address what it described as “increasingly organized, swift and determined” thefts. The document included 33 measures, such as mapping out the most vulnerable sites, recruiting specialized police officers and adding extra security for pieces considered at risk.
Renoir is one of France’s most popular artists, and many of his major paintings are held by storied Paris institutions. The museum that was the site of Tuesday’s thefts has only a small collection of his works, but was an important part of Renoir’s life story. He came to live there in the early 20th century after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and was still working there when he died in 1919. The villa was turned into a museum in 1960, with pieces in its permanent collection including a still life, landscapes, portraits and an unfinished version of his famous work “The Great Bathers.” (A finished version is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
“Attacking the Renoir Museum amounts to attacking part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and heritage,” the mayor said on social media. He said that the theft was “particularly serious” and that it underscored the need for “a comprehensive plan to secure our museums and protect our works of art.”
Jean-Luc Bragato, a local police union representative, said in a broadcast interview that clues had been left inside the museum that would help the police track down the thieves. The authorities said the museum was closed until further notice.
Other recent museum 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. According to a Senate report, 22 thefts were reported in French museums last year, including three at national museums.
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.
Cultural sites in countries like Italy and Spain have also been targeted. In a report published last month, Europol, the inter-European police force, warned of “a shift in both methods and targeting” in museum heists, with thieves using more “violent and forceful methods.”
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