The story
On the night of 12 to 13 November 1972, thieves crossed the rooftops of Bagnols-sur-Cèze, got into the attic of the town hall and cut a hole through the ceiling of the museum's Albert André room. They climbed down a rope ladder and left with 15 paintings, by Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Bonnard, Berthe Morisot and others. None has ever been recovered, and the works are still listed by Interpol.
Those pictures were there because of an earlier disaster. In the 1920s a fire, started by local firemen celebrating their patron saint, destroyed much of the old collection put together by the town historian Léon Alègre. The curator since 1917 was the painter Albert André, a close friend of Renoir. Facing what he called a museum of empty walls, he turned to his circle, and painters such as Monet, Bonnard, Signac and Marquet sent work, as did the Paris dealers Durand-Ruel.
A second wave came from the critic George Besson, another of André's friends, who gave his collection to the French state and asked that part of it be placed in Bagnols. Among those deposits are two paintings by Henri Matisse, The Open Window of 1919 and a portrait of Besson himself in glasses, from 1917. The museum is still on the second floor of the town hall, in the same rooms the thieves broke into.
