<\/p>\n
PARIS (AP) – Thieves stole four valuable Renoir paintings 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.<\/p>\n
A group of \u201cwell-equipped\u201d and \u201cwell-informed\u201d thieves entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer via the garden, the town\u2019s mayor, Bryan Masson, told reporters at the scene.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The museum\u2019s alarm system went off at 5:48 a.m. local time, and police arrived five minutes later, the mayor said. Their swift arrival \u201cforced the burglars to flee in haste and helped limit the scale of the theft,\u201d the mayor said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Two of the stolen works were found in the museum garden, but the two others are still missing, the statement said: \u201cPortrait of Madame Colonna Romano\u201d and \u201cYoung Woman at the Well.\u201d<\/p>\n
An official with the regional police administration confirmed the theft to the AP and the hunt for suspects, and said an investigation is underway.<\/p>\n
The official, who spoke anonymously as they weren\u2019t authorized to be publicly named according to police policy, couldn\u2019t confirm the value of the paintings.<\/p>\n
The museum had 12 works by Renoir in total, the mayor said. The museum was closed Tuesday while the investigation unfolded.<\/p>\n
The mayor called for greater security measures for museums around France. \u201cThis 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,\u201d his statement said.<\/p>\n
Art theft expert James Ratcliffe of the Art Loss Register told the AP that thieves are increasingly targeting valuable artifacts, including traditional art.<\/p>\n
\u201cSadly, without further funding to improve museum security, we are likely to see an increase in the number of museum thefts we see. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The theft came after the spectacular heist of crown jewels at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press.\u00a0
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PARIS (AP) – Thieves stole four valuable Renoir paintings 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 \u201cwell-equipped\u201d and \u201cwell-informed\u201d thieves entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer via the garden, the town\u2019s mayor,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[7967,1382,251,10695,10694,10696,8936,10693],"class_list":["post-32101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jesus","tag-french","tag-missing","tag-museum","tag-paintings","tag-renoir","tag-riviera","tag-steal","tag-thieves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}