When two burglars broke into the Musée Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer before dawn on 8 September 2026, they removed four paintings from the same room in a matter of minutes.  Two were abandoned as the thieves fled.  Two were not.  One of the paintings still missing, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeune Femme au puits, carries with it a history that makes yesterday’s theft considerably more troubling than the loss of a valuable Impressionist painting alone.

Painted around 1886, this small oil on wood, measuring approximately 35 by 27 centimetres, depicting a young woman standing near a well seen in left-side profile as she raises her right arm to hold the rope to which a bucket resting on the well’s rim is attached.  Today it is registered as MNR 579.  The French Ministry of Culture describes it as an unfinished work depicting a woman beside a well and officially classifies it as an “œuvre probablement spoliée”, a work probably looted during the Nazi period, based on the present state of research.

The French government’s Rose-Valland database places the painting as at one point possibly in the collection of Ambroise Vollard and records the possibility that it subsequently belonged to a M. Voigt in Düsseldorf, citing François Daulte’s 1971 catalogue raisonné.  Later, research establishes that the painting was with Galerie Zak in Paris during, and immediately after, the German occupation of France.

That history needs to be understood against the systematic destruction of Jewish participation in the French art world after the Ordonnance d'Aryanisation was declared in October 1940.  Jewish collectors, dealers, and gallery owners were progressively deprived of their businesses, property, and legal rights.  Their collections were confiscated, subjected to forced sales, dispersed through the French and German art markets, or simply seized.  The art market did not sit apart from this process.  It was one of the mechanisms through which dispossession was converted into profit.

Galerie Zack

Among those caught in this machinery was a woman known as, Hedwig (Jadwiga) Zak, a French-Polish Jewish art dealer and the founder of Galerie Zak at 16 rue de l’Abbaye in Paris.   Married to the Belarus painter Eugène Zakartist Zak, her gallery was an important centre for European art between the wars.  

The provenance chronology assembled for Jeune Femme au puits places the Renoir in Zak’s possession by 1941 and records its sale under duress on 3 March of that year to Paris dealer Raphaël Louis Félix Gérard for 80,000 francs, under stock number 1630. Less than a month later, on 1 April 1941, Gérard is recorded as selling the painting onward to “de la Chapelle”, identified as the dealer Luce de la Chapelle of Galerie M. Bénézit, for 100,000 francs.

That sequence is particularly significant when viewed against what is known about Raphaël Gérard’s activities during the Occupation.  Research by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art describes Gérard as a Paris dealer who maintained close contacts with German dealers and representatives of the occupying authorities.  He also profited from substantial sales to German clients, and knowingly traded in works originating from looted Jewish collections during the occupation. 

The fate of Jadwiga Zak was considerably different. She and her son were arrested in 1943 and removed to Auschwitz where she was subsequently sent to the Birkenau camp. By1944, both had been murdered. 

At some point, before the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, Jeune Femme au puits entered another dark chapter.  The painting is documented at the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) as "confiscated by SS man Brandl."  SS officer Hermann Brandl, was chief of the German procurement organisation commonly known as Büro Otto.  

Brandl left France shortly before the Liberation with truckloads of property taken from war victims.  Historian and provenance researcher Marc Masurovsky, cofounder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, who has written extensively on the Galerie Zak, identified this problematic Renoir back in 2012 , known in German documentation as Junge Frau am Brunnen, as being among the artworks carried away by Brandl.

In 1949, French recovery personnel located a cache of property associated with Brandl in Bavaria.  Jeune Femme au puits was found at the home of Martin Reichenwallner in Kölblöd, together with other material connected to the same source.  On 4 May 1949, the painting entered the Munich Central Collecting Point where it was given registration number.  A month later, on 3 June, it was repatriated to France.

But repatriation does not automatically mean restitution.  This painting returned to France with its lawful owner unidentified. On 25 October 1950, it was selected by the Fifth Commission for the Selection of Works from the Artistic Recovery programme, and in 1951 the Office des Biens et Intérêts Privés assigned it to the Louvre’s Department of Paintings.  It was later deposited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules-Chéret in Nice in 1983, transferred into the care of the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, and, in 1995, placed on deposit at the Musée Renoir at Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer.

This is where the significance of its MNR number becomes important.  MNR works are not ordinary property of the French national collections.  The designation Musées Nationaux Récupération was created for cultural objects recovered after the Second World War that could not be returned because their rightful owners had not yet been identified.  The French State holds them provisionally while provenance research (should) continue and where restitution remains possible. The Ministry of Culture reiterated this distinction yesterday when announcing that three of the four Renoirs targeted at Cagnes-sur-Mer were MNR works.

In other words, Jeune Femme au puits has spent more than seventy-five years in French public custody precisely because the history of its wartime displacement has never been completely resolved.

Then, at 5:48 on the morning of 8 September 2026, the painting disappeared again.

The four works had been hanging together in the Chambre Gangnat. The Musée Renoir normally displays only thirteen original Renoir paintings, making the removal of four works from a single room a substantial attack on a very small collection.  There is therefore an unsettling circularity to yesterday’s theft.

For Jeune Femme au puits, the crime committed at Cagnes-sur-Mer is not simply another museum burglary in what has become an increasingly troubling series of thefts from French cultural institutions. I t is another interruption in an already unfinished history of loss.

And because MNR 579 was never truly France’s painting to lose, its recovery matters not only to the Musée Renoir or the Musée d’Orsay. It matters to the still unresolved question that has followed this small Renoir since 1949: to whom should it ultimately be returned?

By; Lynda Albertson