CAGNES-SUR-MER, France, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Thieves stole two Renoir paintings from a museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera on Tuesday after breaking in a little before 6 a.m. through a hole made in a garden fence, the local mayor said.
The thieves had taken two more paintings by the famous Impressionist artist, but dropped them in the gardens as police, alerted by alarms, arrived and gave chase, Mayor Bryan Masson said.
The most valuable works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir have fetched dozens of millions of dollars at auctions.
The two stolen paintings were "Madame Colonna Romano" and "Young Woman at the Well", the municipality said. Both belong to Paris' famous Orsay Museum and were on loan to Cagnes-sur-Mer's Renoir museum.
"It's Renoir's, it is priceless, you cannot sell it like that," the mayor told reporters in front of the museum.
The museum, set up in 1960 in Renoir's mansion on a hill near Nice where he died in 1919, had on display a collection of 13 paintings by the master and some 40 sculptures, items of furniture and photographs.
Art thieves in Europe are committing more violent robberies and specialist gangs have been replaced by ad hoc opportunists recruited through social media, pan-European police body Europol said last month.
It cited as a prime example a heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris in October last year, when thieves stole €88 million ($102.3 million) worth of jewels, such as Empress Eugenie's tiara. Other French museums were also targeted in the past months.
"They are attacking all museums now, we must react," Luc, a neighbour of the Renoir museum, told BFM TV. He was woken up very early by police arriving at the spot of the break-in. "It's very isolated here," he said, pointing at the quiet spot where the museum's garden fence was cut out by the thieves.
($1=0.8605 euros)
(Writing by Inti Landauro and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Alex Richardson, Clarence Fernandez and Alex Richardson)
Posted by: Alma Angeles/NET25 NEWS
