Two stolen Renoirs recovered as six suspects arrested in French Riviera heist

On 10 October 2026, Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson announced that two of four Renoir paintings stolen from the small Riviera museum had been recovered and six suspects arrested almost a month after the burglary. On 8 September thieves cut through a fence at dawn, smashed a ground-floor window, triggered the alarm at 5:48 am and used an electric saw to free four canvases from their frames before fleeing when municipal police arrived five minutes later. The four works were together valued at around 9 million euros (10.5 million dollars). 'Portrait of Madame Pichon' and 'Coco Reading' had been dropped in the museum garden on the morning of the raid, while 'Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano' (1910) and 'Young Woman at the Well' (1886) were the two paintings carried away. Those two canvases have now been retrieved. Six men from the Nice area were taken into custody. The mayor described the thieves as 'well-equipped and well-informed', and French newspaper Nice-Matin reported possible links to an organised criminal gang. The Renoir Museum occupies the painter's final home, Les Collettes, where he lived from 1907 until his death in 1919.