Month: September 2026

Four paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir were stolen from the museum dedicated to the artist in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, early on Tuesday, though the thieves dropped two of them as they fled, leaving two works still missing.

Two intruders broke into the Musée Renoir shortly before 6am, cutting through a fence to reach the grounds through the garden and slicing the clips that held the paintings in their frames, according to the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Bryan Masson. The museum’s alarm was triggered at 5.48am and police arrived within five minutes — an intervention the mayor said “forced the burglars to flee in haste and helped limit the scale of the theft”. Two canvases were recovered in the garden; the other two were gone, and a manhunt is under way. Reports valued the stolen works at an estimated €9 million.

Masson described the raiders as “well-equipped” and “well-informed”, and said they had timed the break-in to coincide with a change of security shift. Their identities remain unknown.

“Attacking the Renoir museum is attacking a part of the history and heritage of Cagnes-sur-Mer,” the mayor said.

The house where Renoir spent his final years

The museum occupies Les Collettes, the hillside estate where Renoir lived out the last years of his life and died in 1919, and which opened as a museum in 1960. It holds around a dozen of the artist’s paintings alongside sculptures, furniture and photographs, and was closed on Tuesday as the investigation got under way.

Part of a wider wave of thefts

The raid is the latest in a run of brazen museum thefts across France and Europe. Last October, thieves made off with French crown jewels valued at €88 million from the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon in Paris in a raid lasting minutes, and in March three paintings — among them a Renoir — were stolen from a private foundation near Parma in Italy. Europol warned last month that specialist gangs were increasingly giving way to opportunists recruited through social media.

Mayor Masson called for tighter security at museums across the country. “This incident should serve as a warning about the protection of our museums, which now face a new form of organised crime targeting works of art,” he said.

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Main photo by Monaco Life

The Opéra de Monte-Carlo is producing its first-ever film, a screen adaptation of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice starring the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli — who also directs the Monegasque house — in the role of Orpheus.

Filming has just begun on the project, which the Opéra describes as an international production designed to lift the 18th-century opera off the stage and turn it into a work made for the cinema and digital platforms. The aim, the house says, is to carry the myth to audiences well beyond the opera world. The film is due to be presented to the public during 2027.

The cast and creative team

Bartoli, who has sung Orpheus on stages around the world, takes one of her signature roles; the part was written for a castrato voice, which the Opéra says suits her range. The soprano Mélissa Petit, a frequent stage partner of Bartoli’s, plays Eurydice. Direction and screenplay are by Davide Livermore and Paolo Gep Cucco, who work regularly with the Opéra, and the film will be distributed by Unitel, a leading German producer and distributor of filmed music.

‘Making the impossible possible’

Bartoli framed the move to film as a chance to escape the limits of the stage. “To conceive Orphée et Eurydice for the cinema is to have the possibility of making the impossible possible,” she said. “Cinema allows us to play with greater freedom and to free ourselves from the constraints of space and technology that belong to the opera stage.”

She said the universal story would let the Opéra “address a far wider audience than opera lovers alone”, offering those who do not usually go to opera houses “a chance to discover the marvellous music of Gluck”.

What’s next for Bartoli

Away from the screen, Bartoli will give concerts across Europe before taking the role of Isabella in Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri, a new Opéra de Monte-Carlo production with the period-instrument ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince. She will then sing Rosina in Le Barbier de Séville at the Staatsoper in Berlin and the Opera of Rome, where she will mark 40 years since her artistic debut.

Monaco Life is written by qualified journalists, writing original content. Sign up for our free newsletter, listen to our podcasts on Spotify, and follow us across Facebook,  Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok. 

Main photo: Cecilia Bartoli, credit: Orphée et Eurydice