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