CAGNES-SUR-MER(National Times)- Police were on Tuesday hunting for two thieves who escaped with two Renoir paintings from a museum in southern France, after abandoning two others in its garden as they fled, a mayor said.
The heist is the latest in a string of such robberies in France including the daylight theft last year of crown jewellery valued at around $100 million from the Louvre in Paris. Bryan Masson, the mayor of the southern town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, said the duo appeared “well equipped and well informed” about the museum housing works by French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
“They were equipped with a metal saw and cut through the pistons that held the frames of Renoir’s works,” he said. But “the museum and police sirens forced the burglars to hurry, stealing only four works from the Renoir Museum,” he added.
Of those four, two were “left behind in the gardens of the Renoir museum”, added the far-right official, whose office earlier estimated the value of the stolen works at 9 million euros ($10 million).
They made off with a portrait titled “Madame Colonna Romano” and the depiction of a woman at a well called “Jeune femme au puits”, his office said. The paintings retrieved include “Madame Pichon” and “Coco lisant”, a portrait of Renoir’s young son Claude reading.
