Nine Impressionist paintings taken from the Marmottan

At about a quarter past ten on Sunday 27 October 1985, two men bought tickets and walked into the Musée Marmottan in Paris. The New York Times reported at least five gunmen in all. The two inside drew weapons and held the nine unarmed guards and about 40 visitors. Three others took paintings from the walls and broke into a glass case that held two more. The pictures went into the boot of a grey car outside. The raid took about five minutes. The alarm did not ring, because it ran only at night, when the museum was shut.

Nine paintings were gone: five by Claude Monet, two by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one by Berthe Morisot and one by Seiichi Naruse. The best known was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. The museum dates it to 1872 and describes a view of Le Havre, painted in oil on canvas, 50 by 65 centimetres. It was shown at the first group exhibition of the painters in 1874. The critic Louis Leroy took its title for the word “Impressionists”. The museum accepted it as a gift from Eugène and Victorine Donop de Monchy in 1940. The curator Yves Brayer called it “the theft of the century”, the Los Angeles Times reported. UPI, quoting French news reports, said the paintings were not insured. Press estimates of their worth ranged from 10 million to 20 million dollars. These are not sale prices.

For five years the trail ran between Tokyo and Paris. Le Parisien and franceinfo report that in April 1986 a man in Tokyo, who claimed to act for the yakuza, showed Polaroids of the Monet at the French embassy and asked for a ransom. The sums differ: franceinfo gives 500 million dollars, Le Parisien 500 million francs. Fingerprints from a cash-van attack in Tokyo in late 1986 matched those left at a museum in Semur-en-Auxois, where five Corot paintings had been stolen in 1984. Police followed this to a gang from Aubervilliers. In 1988, franceinfo reports, a Corsican contact told Paris police he held the Monets and wanted Corsican prisoners freed.

On 3 and 4 December 1990, police searched homes at Porto-Vecchio in southern Corsica. They found photographs of the paintings at the home of a local barman. All nine paintings were in a crate in an empty apartment on the night of 4 to 5 December. Reports differ on the exact night. UPI said seven people were held and most were later freed.

Le Parisien reported in 2025 that no one was convicted for the raid itself. It reports that members of the Aubervilliers gang were convicted in 1990 and 1992 of other offences: receiving the Corot paintings, and the Tokyo van attack. Artnet reports that the gang always denied any part in the Marmottan raid. The gunmen have not been identified in these sources. In 1991 the museum’s curator, Arnaud d’Hauterives, said he expected never to learn who ordered the theft. Links to the yakuza and to Corsican groups are reported, not proved.

The paintings went back on the wall on 16 April 1991. D’Hauterives said Impression, Sunrise had suffered no damage, apart from five years shut away, and restorers removed a yellowed varnish added after Monet’s lifetime. Artnet reports that the Morisot was badly damaged. Impression, Sunrise is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.