Renoir Museum Theft: Two Masterpieces Missing After French Riviera Heist
Two Renoir paintings are missing after a heist at the French Riviera museum; two others were abandoned in the garden.
Two valuable paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir are missing following a theft at the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. The thieves initially took four works by the impressionist master but abandoned two in the museum garden as they fled, according to the town's mayor.
The missing pieces are "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" and "Young Woman at the Well." The museum's collection includes a total of twelve Renoir works. Police are currently searching for the perpetrators.
The incident adds to a long history of audacious art thefts worldwide. Earlier this year, three paintings were stolen from the Magnani Rocca Foundation in Italy, including works by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse. Those pieces were later recovered by Italian authorities, and five suspects were detained.
In a separate high-profile case, the Louvre in Paris was the target of a daytime heist in October, where thieves used a basket lift to enter and stole jewelry belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte's family. While the crew was captured, most of the jewels remain missing.
Other notable unsolved cases include the 1990 theft of 13 artworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the 2019 burglary of Dresden's Green Vault, where diamond-studded royal jewels were taken. More recent incidents have involved a solid gold coin stolen from Berlin's Bode Museum and a golden toilet swiped from Blenheim Palace in England.