Recent art thefts appear to be inspired by 2025 Louvre heist, art crime experts say

Kevin Maimann · CBC News

· Posted: Sep 09, 2026 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 10 minutes ago

Art crime experts say last year's headline-grabbing Louvre heist appears to have inspired a rash of brazen art thefts, putting European museums that hold valuable works in a difficult position.

Thieves cut a hole in a fence and climbed through a window to steal four paintings from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera early Tuesday, local authorities said. They dropped two of the works as police gave chase.

Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most valuable works have sold for tens of millions of dollars.

Anthony Amore, an art theft expert and investigator based in Boston, Mass., says the Renoir theft is the latest in a string of high-profile incidents since thieves made off with $140 million Cdn worth of Napoleonic jewelry from the Louvre in Paris last October.

"In my twenty-odd years of doing this sort of work, I haven't seen anything on this scale," Amore said.

• Thieves steal paintings from Renoir Museum on French Riviera

• Thieves in balaclavas, on motorbikes steal crown jewels in Louvre heist

"My best guess is that perhaps the Louvre was a news hook, not just for the media, but for criminal gangs that saw the opportunity to steal valuables and get away with it."

Police arrested four suspects in the Louvre heist, but most of the jewels remain missing.

'Extraordinarily stupid'

Experts who spoke with CBC News noted similarities with other recent thefts, including the March theft of works by Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse worth millions of dollars. Masked men broke into the Fondazione Magnani Rocca museum near Parma, Italy, but police recovered the paintings and arrested five suspects in August.

Four Renaissance paintings by Antonello da Messina, worth more than $100 million, were stolen from the Museo Regionale di Messina in Sicily in August in a crime that remains unsolved.

Other French museums have also been targeted in recent months.

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at City University of New York, calls the thefts "Louvre-inspired."

She says art heists tend to be carried out by "hired, low-level criminals," but added that stealing well-known artwork is "an extraordinarily stupid thing to do."

• Stolen artworks by Cézanne, Matisse and Renoir recovered by Italian police

• Antonello da Messina artworks stolen from museum in Italy

Thompson told CBC News that thieves rarely escape punishment and said the Renoir paintings would be very difficult to sell, given the high-profile nature of the theft and the works themselves.

"I think they read the headlines about the Louvre heist and not the rest of the story. Many people who steal art from display in museums, throughout history, have been good at stealing things and not good at thinking through the consequences," Thompson said.

"They spot the rather obvious security flaws of museums, they know that art is valuable, and they figure they'll take it and then come up with a plan afterwards."

Museums under pressure

Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson said the Renoir theft should "serve as a warning about the protection of our museums."

The French government has come under pressure to address security failures at the country’s museums. A French parliamentary report ​this summer said museums lacked resources and were ill-prepared to safeguard valuable artworks and cultural artifacts.

A Culture Ministry survey in 2024 ⁠found that only one in four institutions had an emergency and risk prevention plan, while nearly half lacked ⁠any video surveillance.

The painting entitled Young Woman at the Well, by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was stolen Tuesday. (Musée Renoir/Handout/Reuters)

Thompson says the situation poses a complicated problem. In some ways, she says, museum security is poor because of a "long history of poor funding" and assumptions that people "will behave in museums."

But, she says, there is only so much a museum can do.

"Many of them are in historical buildings that you can't exactly fortify. And the experience of going into a museum is supposed to be anybody can go buy a ticket and stick their nose a couple inches away from some priceless artifact," she said.

"You're not supposed to have searches and guard dogs interrupting your experience of contemplating art."

WATCH | Former FBI investigator on art heists:

Sally Hickson, an associate professor of art history at the University of Guelph, says recent high-profile thefts have been carried out at smaller provincial museums that don't have sophisticated security.

But even better-known museums may not be as locked down as some people assume, she says.

"The kind of high-tech security that people tend to expect from the Oceans movies and stuff like that, that doesn't exist in even a lot of major museums."

Thieves will 'never, ever' stop: expert

Amore says France in particular has an "extraordinary" number of museums, all with differing levels of security.

But tightening security, he says, may only push thieves to move more toward more "smash-and-grab" style thefts — a trend that already appears to be happening.

An August report from pan-European police body Europol found that art thieves in Europe are resorting to more violent and forceful methods, and specialist gangs have increasingly been ⁠replaced ⁠by ad hoc opportunists recruited through social ​media.

"Even if all these museums do beef up their security, there will probably be people still trying to find ways to get around it," Amore said. "People will never, ever stop trying."