Before sunrise on the French Riviera, inside a quiet hilltop museum once home to Pierre‑Auguste Renoir, thieves slipped through a garden fence and into the headlines. They intended to take 12 Renoir Paintings, but managed to get four. And as police swarmed in, dropped two while making a panicked escape. Now the art world is once again asking: Who steals masterpieces they can never sell?
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TRANSCRIPT
Before sunrise on the French Riviera, thieves arrived at a quiet hilltop museum with a fairly simple plan.
Cut through the fence, make it quickly across the garden, break into the building, steal some paintings and leave.
And it all seemed to be working magnificently - almost as magnificent as their target, several Renoir paintings.
The building is Renoir's former home in Cagnes-sur-Mer [[Can-ye - soor - mer]] , located between Nice [[Nees]] and Cannes [[Can]].
Bryan Masson is the local mayor.
He says the thieves were quick and clumsy.
“They were equipped with, if I may say so, an electric knife, a metal saw, whatever you want to call it, and they cut the pistons that held the frames of the Renoir works. The intervention of the municipal police, the museum sirens and the police sirens forced the burglars to hurry, to steal only four works of the twelve in the museum’s collection. They fled by running through the gardens, and it would seem that they lost two works along the way.”
Those two paintings were recovered in the garden.
Next door, lives a man who only gave his name as "Luc".who slept through it all.
“I was woken up by the police officers at a quarter to seven, it was strange. ... I’m the museum’s next-door neighbour .... and next door are elderly residents. .. It's unsettling. We really need to react and do something to stop this from happening again.”
What had happened was that the thieves managed to take two masterpieces - Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Young Woman at the Well, both paintings on loan from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Now the police are on the hunt for the paintings and the culprits who now have another problem.
James Ratcliffe, from the Art Loss Register, suspects the suspects may have thought a lot more about getting into the museum than what they would do once they got out.
I think what happened today at the Renoir Museum is an example of thieves seeing an opportunity to take objects that they perceive as high value, but without necessarily thinking through what their next steps will be.”
Those next steps are where the peculiar economics of art theft come in.
The more famous and valuable the painting, the fewer people there are who can afford it.
And once everyone knows it's stolen, that already tiny market virtually disappears.
“If you imagine that for any high-value picture, say, that’s worth a few million euros, there’s probably only, say, a few hundred people at most in the world who might be interested in buying it, who could afford to buy it. Now, if I say to you that they have to be willing to buy it knowing that it’s stolen property and that they can’t show it to anybody, that list of people who would be prepared to purchase it is probably diminishing to probably to nobody.”
The paintings are also well documented.
Their photographs are already circulating and they're registered with the Art Loss Register, making them readily recognisable to dealers and auction houses.
French prosecutors are investigating the theft as the work of an organised gang.
As for the way the raid unfolded, Mr Ratcliffe suspects something less sophisticated.
“This is going to be people who, as I say, saw an opportunity, seemingly quite straightforward, to just cut through a chain-link fence and then break a window, grab some pictures, pull them off the wall and do a runner. That doesn’t require, to my mind, a huge amount of organisation, and it makes me think it’s more likely to be petty criminals rather than organised crime.”
France has seen this before.
Just a few months ago, thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris and escaped with crown jewels from the Apollo Gallery worth 88 million euros, including a tiara once belonging to Empress Eugenie.
Those thieves have options that include breaking-up the jewelry, recutting it or melting it down into something unrecognisable that can easily be sold.
As for these thieves .... they have Renoirs, and Renoirs must remain Renoirs to maintain their value.
