DNA Leads Police Back to the Renoirs

A museum theft can sound almost elegant until the details strip that away. In Cagnes-sur-Mer, prosecutors say two Renoir paintings worth millions of euros were recovered after investigators followed something much less romantic than the art itself: DNA on an abandoned cover and data from a tracked vehicle.

Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said four men received preliminary charges in the case involving the theft of “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well” from the Musée Renoir in September. According to the prosecutor, the group got into the museum by sawing through a fence with an electric saw and cutting the clips holding four paintings before an alarm sounded.

That alarm appears to have mattered. Bessone said the suspects panicked and left two works behind as they fled, with the paintings later found in a protective cover. The investigation then turned on traces people leave when they imagine they have escaped cleanly. DNA from the cover, he said, matched a 29-year-old already under police scrutiny in a separate drug-trafficking investigation. Because that man’s vehicle was being tracked in that case, investigators were able to map movements after the theft.

Bessone said the tracking data indicated that the 29-year-old and a 41-year-old visited the home of a third man after the museum break-in. Prosecutors say the third suspect hid the paintings behind a wall under a staircase, where investigators recovered them.

What the case underlines is not the glamour of art crime but its ordinariness. Even when the target is a Renoir, prosecutors describe a chain of entry tools, alarm-triggered mistakes, forensic evidence and movement data. The paintings are exceptional; the investigative logic is not.

The prosecutor also said arrests were accelerated by what authorities called a “very strong suspicion” that another theft was being prepared. Surveillance had found that the 29-year-old visited the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on 3 October, Bessone said, and later met a man known to police from art-theft and forgery cases in the early 2000s. That is an allegation from investigators, not a proven second plot. But it helps explain why the case did not end with recovering two canvases. It widened into a question of what might have been taken next.