Paintings worth millions of pounds by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse have been stolen from a museum in a three-minute heist.
Four masked thieves broke into the Magnani Rocca Foundation villa near Parma in northern Italy last week and removed the artworks in the middle of the night, a police spokesperson said.
Les Poissons by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Still Life with Cherries by Paul Cézanne and Odalisque on the Terrace by Henri Matisse, were stolen, according to local media.
The estimated total value of the stolen paintings amounts to €9m (£7.8m), the BBC reported. Les Poissons alone is valued at €6m.
The burglars managed to crack open the entrance door and infiltrate a room on the first floor, the museum told the broadcaster SkyTG24.
The thieves were interrupted by the museum’s alarm system, which drew police and security officers, but they escaped across the museum gardens and scaled a fence, according to the broadcaster TGR. The museum told reporters that the gang appeared “structured and organised”.
The Magnani Rocca Foundation, founded in 1977, holds the collection of the art historian and composer Luigi Magnani. It includes the works of famous artists including Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya and Monet.
Renoir, a pioneer of the Impressionist movement, completed Les Poissons in around 1917. Cézanne’s Still Life with Cherries, finished in around 1890, is particularly rare because it makes use of watercolour, which the artist only pursued in the final years of his life, according to the foundation.
The incident is the latest in a series of art thefts across Europe recently. Last October a gang broke in through a window of the Louvre in Paris and stole €88m (£67m) worth of crown jewels in under eight minutes. Four suspects, three men and one woman, were charged with the theft the next month.
