By ANGELA CHARLTON Associated Press
PARIS (AP) — Thieves stole four valuable Renoir paintings on Tuesday from a small museum on the French Riviera, but abandoned two of them as they fled, the local mayor said. Police are searching for the perpetrators.
A group of “well-equipped” and “well-informed” thieves entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer via the garden, the town’s mayor, Bryan Masson, told reporters at the scene.
They sliced through a fence with an electric knife or saw, entered the museum through the ground floor, and then cut the clips securing the artwork frames, Masson said in remarks carried by local broadcaster Ici Azur.
The museum’s alarm system went off at 5:48 a.m. local time, and police arrived five minutes later, the mayor said. Their swift arrival “forced the burglars to flee in haste and helped limit the scale of the theft,” the mayor said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press.
Two of the stolen works were found in the museum garden, but the statement said that two others are still missing: “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well.” Authorities haven’t provided the names of the other two paintings.
An official with the regional police administration confirmed the theft to the AP and the hunt for suspects, and said that an investigation was underway.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to be publicly named according to police policy, couldn’t confirm the value of the paintings.
The museum had 12 works by Renoir in total, the mayor said. The museum was closed Tuesday while the investigation unfolded.
The mayor called for greater security measures for museums around France.
“This incident should serve as a warning about the protection of our museums, which now face a new form of organized crime targeting works of art,” his statement said.
Art theft expert James Ratcliffe of the Art Loss Register told the AP that thieves are increasingly targeting valuable artifacts, including traditional art.
“Sadly, without further funding to improve museum security, we are likely to see an increase in the number of museum thefts … Each time thefts occur, it draws yet more attention to the perception of these museums as relatively easy targets. That can only encourage some criminals to consider them as straightforward places to steal from.”
The theft came after the spectacular heist of crown jewels at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year.
The Renoir Museum is housed in the last home of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, where he lived before his death in 1919. It’s the most famous attraction in Cagnes-sur-Mer, situated between Cannes and Nice on the Mediterranean coast.