Two Renoir paintings stolen from French museum recovered within a month

Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano. [Reuters]

Two paintings by Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) worth 9 million euros ($10.1 million) that were stolen from a Renoir museum in southern France last month have been recovered within a month.

Brian Masson, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the museum is located, announced in a statement Friday (local time) that the two stolen paintings had been retrieved, according to AFP and the Associated Press.

"This news is a great joy and relief for Cagnes-sur-Mer and its residents," Masson said. "These two paintings are not simply works of art — they are part of our city's history." He expressed gratitude to France's Office Central de Lutte contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, the national agency dedicated to combating the illegal trafficking of cultural property.

The recovered works are "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" (1910) and "Young Woman at a Well" (1886). The mayor's office estimated the value of the stolen works at 9 million euros. Both paintings are part of the Musée d'Orsay collection in Paris and had been on loan to the Renoir museum since 1995. No details were released about when or how the paintings were recovered, or their condition.

The thieves cut through the museum's garden fence with a chainsaw just before 6 a.m. on Sept. 8 and entered the building through a window. They stole four paintings in total — including Renoir's "Portrait of Madame Stéphane Piéchon" (1895) and "Coco Reading" (1905), a portrait of the artist's young son Claude. When police responded to the alarm, the thieves dropped those two works in the museum garden and fled.

Police arrived at the scene within five minutes of the alarm sounding, but the thieves had already vanished. Prosecutors said the robbery took less than three minutes and that the thieves had targeted the museum's most valuable works.

Masson said on the day of the incident that the perpetrators were "well-equipped" and "well-informed." French police recently arrested six people in connection with the case.

The Renoir museum is housed in the villa where the painter spent the last 12 years of his life. A landmark attraction in Cagnes-sur-Mer, situated on the Mediterranean coast between Cannes and Nice, it displays 13 Renoir paintings and around 40 sculptures.

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