Artwork worth millions stolen from France’s Renoir Museum, mayor says

LONDON — Two suspects broke into the Renoir Museum in France early on Tuesday, allegedly stealing four works of art, including two paintings that they abandoned as they made their escape, the local mayor said.

An alarm was triggered at 5:48 a.m. at the museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Bryan Masson, the local mayor, said in a post in French on social media.

Police arrived on the scene within five minutes, but the suspects, whom the mayor described as a “well-equipped and apparently well-informed team,” were already gone, he said.

“I want to tell you that they were equipped with an electric knife or a metal saw –whatever you prefer to call it — and they cut through the bolts holding the frames of Renoir’s works in place,” Masson told reporters gathered at the museum. ‎”The police intervention and the museum’s alarms caused the robbers to rush and steal only four of the 12 works from the Renoir Museum.”

The city’s video surveillance cameras captured them as they fled, abandoning one of the stolen paintings as they ran, the mayor said. He later clarified that it appeared they had dropped a second painting, so “only two works were actually stolen.”

“Both works were abandoned in the gardens of the Renoir Museum,” Masson said.

French media quoted the mayor as saying the stolen art was thought to be worth an estimated 9 million euros, or about $10 million. It was not immediately clear whether that estimate was for all the works, or just for those that the thieves made off with.

The incident in the south of France on Tuesday followed last October’s brazen and high-profile theft at the Louvre Museum in central Paris, where several people disguised as construction workers cracked open display cases and stole jewelry that once belonged to Emperor Napoleon and his wife.

Local and national police were on site in Cagnes-sur-Mer on Tuesday, the mayor said, adding that a manhunt for the two suspects was underway.

Images published by a news agency showed police officers investigating what appeared to be a hole cut into a chain-link fence outside the museum. The mayor confirmed that the suspects had entered the museum’s gardens through the hole after cutting through the fence.

Founded in 1960 and renovated in the 2010s, the museum in the south of France celebrates the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, an impressionist painter who died in 1919.

“Targeting the Renoir Museum means targeting a part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and heritage,” the mayor said. “This is a very serious incident.”

He added that the theft “confirms the need to immediately launch the comprehensive plan to secure our museums and protect our artworks — a plan to which I have committed.”

The city of de Cagnes-sur-Mer said in a post on social media that the museum would be closed until further notice.

News’ Leontine Gallois and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.