A look at the theft of Renoir paintings from a French museum and other high-profile heists

Thieves hit the Renoir Museum on the French Riviera and made off with four valuable works by French Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir, though they ditched two in the museum garden as they fled, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer said yesterday (8 September).

The two missing paintings are "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" and "Young Woman at the Well". The museum housed 12 works by Renoir in total.

As police search for the perpetrators, here's a look at some other famous art heists:

Thieves absconded in March with three paintings by French masters from the Magnani Rocca Foundation, a private museum near the city of Parma in northern Italy.

The three stolen paintings, "Fish" by Auguste Renoir, "Still Life with Cherries" by Paul Cézanne and "Odalisque on the Terrace" by Henri Matisse, were considered minor works but were still estimated to be worth millions of euros.

They were recovered in August by the Italian Carabinieri's art recovery squad. Five people believed to be part of an organised crime group were detained in connection with the theft.

Nine pieces from the jewellery collection of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his family were taken from the Louvre in October during a dramatic daytime heist.

The thieves hit the famed Paris museum shortly after it opened to visitors, using a basket lift to scale the facade. Within minutes, they smashed display cases, making off with jewels estimated to be worth €88 million, including a sapphire diadem, a necklace and a single earring.

The four-person crew behind the heist was eventually captured, but the jewels have not been recovered, except for the diamond- and emerald-studded crown of Empress Eugénie, which was found damaged outside the museum after the thieves apparently dropped it. The theft also prompted the world's most visited museum to replace its director and step up security and surveillance.

The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous was in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a former worker who hid inside the museum and walked out with the painting under his coat.

It was recovered two years later in Florence, an episode that helped make Leonardo da Vinci's portrait the world's best-known artwork.

It's been called the biggest art heist in US history, but 35 years later, the theft of 13 works from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains unsolved.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers talked their way into the museum by saying they were responding to a call. They overpowered two security guards, bound them with duct tape, and spent 81 minutes pilfering 13 works of art, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.

Authorities say the artwork is worth perhaps as much as $500 million. Museum officials say it is priceless because it cannot be replaced.

Some of the works, including Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee", were cut from their frames. Those frames hang empty in the museum to this day.

In 2017, burglars at Berlin's Bode Museum stole a 100-kilogram solid gold Canadian coin known as the "Big Maple Leaf".

The suspects are believed to have smashed a protective case, lifted the coin out through a museum window, and fled along a railway track with their haul in a wheelbarrow. Authorities believe they later cut up the coin, valued at about €3.75 million, and sold the pieces.

Three men, including a museum security guard, were later convicted.

Two years later, thieves smashed display cases in Dresden's Green Vault, one of the world's oldest museums, and carried off diamond-studded royal jewels worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Officials said they made off with three "priceless" sets of 18th-century jewellery that would be impossible to sell on the open market.

Part of the haul was later recovered. Five men were convicted, and a sixth was acquitted.

A thief who swiped a golden toilet from an English palace was convicted last year, along with an accomplice who helped cash in on the spoils of the 18-carat work of art, which was insured for nearly £5 million.

Michael Jones had used the fully functioning, one-of-a-kind latrine while conducting reconnaissance at Blenheim Palace, the country mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born, the day before the theft, prosecutors said. He described the experience as "splendid".

He returned before dawn on September 14, 2019, with at least two other men armed with sledgehammers and crowbars. They smashed a window and pried the toilet from its plumbing within five minutes, leaving a damaging flood in their wake as they escaped in stolen vehicles.

The satirical work, titled "America", by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, poked fun at excessive wealth. It weighed just over 215 pounds. The value of the gold at the time was $2.8 million.

The purloined potty has never been recovered but is believed to have been cut up and sold.

The piece was previously on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The museum offered the work to US President Donald Trump during his first term in office after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.