Thieves stole two paintings worth an estimated €9 million from the Renoir Museum on the French Riviera early on Tuesday, the local mayor said.
The raiders broke into the museum a little before 6am and took four paintings, Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson said on his Facebook page.
Police spotted the thieves and gave chase, during which they dropped two paintings in a garden but escaped with the other two, he said.
Speaking to reporters, Masson said the sound of police sirens and the museum’s alarms caused the thieves to rush away from the scene.
He said they “fled by running in the gardens” and lost two paintings in the process.
“So there are only two works of art that have been stolen”, he said.
The museum has a collection of 12 Renoir paintings, four of which were stolen.
The museum was created in 1960 in the mansion of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir on a hill in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, where he died in 1919.
In addition to Renoir’s paintings, the collection on display in the museum includes some 40 sculptures, furniture and photographs.
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French newspaper Nice-Matin reports that the four stolen paintings are: Portrait of Madame Pichon (1895); Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910); Coco Lisant (1905); andJeune femme au puits (1886).
Coco Lisant (1905) 
A portrait of Madame Pinchon (1895)
“Attacking the Renoir museum is attacking a part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and cultural heritage,” Masson wrote on Facebook.
Art thieves in Europe are committing more violent robberies and specialist gangs have been replaced by ad hoc opportunists recruited through social media, pan-European police body Europol said last month.
The heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris in October last year was a prime example of this, Europol said, as the thieves threatened guards and visitors and stole €88 million worth of jewels, such as Empress Eugenie’s tiara.
That theft in broad daylight embarrassed museum and Government officials and prompted a 33-measure action plan from the cultural ministry.
In July, a 2,500-year-old gold necklace weighing around half a kilogram was stolen from a museum in eastern France, after it was targeted by two previous attempted robberies, Agence France-Presse reported.
Thieves also made away earlier that month with €4.5 million worth of jewellery from the Lalique museum near Strasbourg, by the German border.
Museums in neighbouring countries have been targeted recently. Last month, 3,000-year-old bracelets, bowls and other pieces made mostly of gold were stolen from a museum in a medieval town in eastern Spain, and a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace valued at around $4 million was stolen from a Vienna museum. – R ters/Bloomberg
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