Two Renoir Paintings Stolen from French Riviera Museum — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Two thieves sliced through the Renoir Museum's garden fence with an electric knife or metal saw, triggering a 5:48am alarm and fleeing before police arrived roughly five minutes later.
- They made off with "Young Woman at the Well" and "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" — both on loan from Paris's Musée d'Orsay and valued at ~€9m — while abandoning "Portrait of Madame Pichon" and "Coco Reading" in the museum gardens during the getaway.
- Mayor Bryan Masson (National Rally) said the pair appeared "well equipped and well informed" and called for greater security, warning French museums now face "a new form of organised crime targeting works of art."
- The Renoir Museum, established in 1960 in the mansion where Pierre-Auguste Renoir died aged 78 in 1919, holds around a dozen of his paintings and roughly 40 sculptures about 10 miles west of Nice.
- Art Loss Register's James Ratcliffe warned museums risk becoming "relatively easy targets" without more security funding, as a recent Europol report noted European museum robberies growing more violent — with guns, sledgehammers, and explosives.
Why it matters: Two of about a dozen paintings at the museum — both on loan from the Musée d'Orsay and valued at ~€9m — were taken before police arrived roughly five minutes after the 5:48am alarm. Mayor Masson's call for security funding now lands on France's culture ministry as European museum heists multiply.
Ask SkimNews
