New theft, different target: while gold treasures with intrinsic value aroused the desire of museum burglars this summer, this time, it was paintings that were stolen. Tuesday, September 8, in the early morning, at least two individuals entered the Renoir Museum, located in the painter’s last home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, to take down four paintings. Rushed by the rapid arrival of the police, the thieves abandoned two of them, found in the gardens of the house.
Recordings from the city’s video surveillance cameras show two individuals entering the scene by cutting the fence with an electric knife, then breaking a window. Once inside the museum, they cut the painting mounting systems using a metal saw. The alarm sounded at 5:48 a.m., alerting the police who arrived on scene five minutes later.
Despite the speed of the intervention, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer Bryan Masson (RN) reported “efforts to be made” regarding the security of the establishment. The councilor described the individuals as “people who knew exactly what they were doing”suspecting the action of professionals. The Grasse public prosecutor’s office opened a blatant investigation, entrusted to the service for the fight against organized crime and specialized delinquency (DCOS). For the moment, no precise estimate of the loss has been communicated. Bryan Masson had announced an amount of 9 million euros, but it concerned all 4 paintings won, and requires a re-evaluation.
The Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer.
Works abandoned in gardens must be the subject of findings by the judicial police. Although two of the four targeted paintings have been recovered, the damage remains significant given the scale of the collection, originally composed of only 13 paintings, around forty sculptures, pieces of furniture, personal archives and photographs. The four works targeted are paintings by Renoir deposited by the Musée d’Orsay in Cagnes-sur-Mer. While the Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon (1895) and Coco Reading (1905) were able to be saved, the Young woman at the well (c. 1886) and the Portrait of Madame Colonna (c. 1910) were taken away by the criminals.
The two missing works appear in the inventory of the National Museums Recovery (MNR), which lists works stolen or confiscated during the Second World War and entrusted to the National Museums pending the identification of their beneficiaries. Found after the war and entrusted to the National Museums in 1950, the Portrait of Madame Colonna was exhibited at the Renoir Museum since 1995, after having been the subject of successive deposits, at the Masséna Museum and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice. As for the Young woman at the wellan unfinished work on wood, it belonged to the Ambroise Vollard collection, implying that it could have been acquired by the Otto organization, a German service which purchased works on the black market in France during the war, or seized by its leader Hermann Brandel. She was found in Bavaria in 1949, the year she was repatriated to France.
Located in the Domaine des Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the Renoir Museum opened in 1960 in this former house of the painter, where he lived until his death in 1919. Classified as a historic monument and labeled “Heritage of the 20th century”, the villa offers testimony to the last years of the life of Auguste Renoir. It also houses works by artists around him, such as Aristide Maillol, Raoul Dufy and Pierre Bonnard.
