Two Renoir Works Missing as Another French Museum Targeted by Thieves

News / Museums and Institutions Violent Museum Thefts on the Rise, Europol Report Warns Imogen Lees

In the early hours of this morning, two thieves broke into the Renoir Museum on the French Riviera and stole four artworks valued by local authorities at at an estimated €9 million.

According to a statement from Bryan Masson, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the museum is located, the perpetrators were quickly detected by the city’s surveillance cameras and the alarm was triggered at 5.48am. Municipal police arrived on the scene five minutes later.

“Faced with an organised, well-equipped, and obviously well-informed unit, the responsiveness of our municipal police has limited the theft at the Renoir Museum,” Masson said. “I salute the professionalism of the police and investigators fully mobilised to find this invaluable heritage, dear to the heart of the Cagnois.” 

The thieves dropped two of the stolen artworks in the museum garden while being pursued by police. Two works remain at large.

Local newspaper Nice-Matin reported that the four stolen paintings, all by the French Impressionist, are Portrait of Madame Pichon (1895), Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910), Coco Lisant (1905) and Jeune femme au puits (1886). Portrait of Madame Pinchon and Coco Lisant are thought to have been left in the garden, with Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Jeune femme au puits still missing.

Masson added that he had already filed the necessary paperwork to increase security measures at the museum, but that this incident “only confirms the urgency of speeding up this work”. He urged the French state to do its part to secure the country’s national heritage. 

Both local and national police forces have been deployed to find the individuals, and an investigation is under way. The museum is closed to the public until further notice. 

The burglary is part of a worrying trend of targeted smash-and-grab museum heists, similar to the theft at Paris’s Louvre Museum in 2025, and a series of other, high profile robberies at museums across Europe this summer.

Last month, the international crime agency Europol published a report warning of criminals using increasingly violent methods to target high value items from museums. The report suggested a shift in tactics from criminal groups, moving away from the usual profile of non-violent cultural heritage traffickers towards recruiting petty criminals on social media, placing valuable cultural heritage at increased risk of damage.