MARSEILLE, France: Two thieves broke into a museum dedicated to French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in southern France, stealing four artworks but abandoning two as they fled the scene.
“The museum and police sirens forced the burglars to hurry, stealing only four works from the Renoir Museum out of the twelve the museum holds,” said Bryan Masson, the mayor of the town of Cagnes-sur-Mer.
He added that of those four, two were left behind in the gardens of the Renoir Museum.
The two stolen paintings are Madame Colonna Romano and Young Woman at the Well. Both belong to Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. The paintings found in the garden were Madame Pichon and Coco lisant, a portrait of Renoir’s son Claude reading.
Suite au cambriolage du Musée Renoir à #CagnesSurMer, je demande une véritable prise de conscience.
Voler un musée c’est s’attaquer au patrimoine des Français et à notre culture.
Face à des réseaux organisés la sécurisation de nos musées doit devenir une priorité nationale. pic.twitter.com/Jlb199cL5D
— Bryan Masson (@MassonBryan) September 8, 2026
The Renoir Museum was opened in 1960 in the painter’s final home, where he lived until his death in 1919.
The museum’s collection includes personal belongings and furniture once owned by Renoir, including his easel and wheelchair, alongside a selection of his portraits and landscapes.
The mayor said authorities responded to the break-in within just five minutes.
“The museum alarm went off at 5:48 am. At 5:53 am, just five minutes later, our municipal police were on the scene,” he said.
French police launch investigation
Police have launched an investigation into the theft and are working to establish how the suspects gained access to the museum and whether they had prior knowledge of the collection.
Investigators are also expected to examine security footage and other evidence from the scene in an effort to identify those responsible.
The theft comes less than a year after eight items worth around $100 million were stolen from the Louvre in Paris in a daylight robbery.
Four suspects in the Louvre heist have since been arrested, but the stolen items remain missing despite extensive searches by French investigators across the Paris region and cooperation with police in Belgium, Italy and other countries.
Italian police said in August that they had recovered paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth more than $10.4 million. The artworks had been stolen during a three-minute heist at a museum in March.
One of France’s most notorious art thefts took place in 1911, when Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The disappearance of the painting caused an international sensation and prompted an extensive investigation. The thief was an Italian glazier who had worked at the museum and helped install frames for its paintings.
He was arrested two years later after attempting to sell the stolen masterpiece. The Mona Lisa was eventually returned to the Louvre, where it went on to become one of the world’s most famous and heavily visited works of art.
