Thieves sliced through a fence, grabbed 9 million euros ($14.5 million) worth of art, dumped half of it in a garden and escaped in under three minutes. That's what went down when two thieves targeted the most valuable works of the famous impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir at a museum on the French Riviera. The theft conjured up painful memories of the crown jewels heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year and triggered a national search for the perpetrators. Here's how they pulled it off. How did the thieves steal the paintings? A half-hour drive from the southern city of Nice, in Renoir's last home before he died aged 78 in 1919, lies the Renoir Museum. On Tuesday, two "well-equipped" thieves cut through the garden fence of that home using an "electric knife or saw", the Cagnes-sur-Mer Mayor Bryan Masson said.The thieves broke into the museum by cutting a hole in the outer fence. (Reuters: Manon Cruz)Shortly before 6am in the town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, they entered the museum on the ground flood via the garden and climbed through a window before cutting the clips securing the frames of four Renoir paintings. This triggered the museum's alarm system. And within three minutes, the thieves had fled the scene through a garden, abandoning two of the artworks in the dirt. Five minutes later, the police arrived."The museum and police sirens forced the burglars to hurry, stealing only four works from the Renoir Museum," the mayor said.The thieves targeted the museum in the early hours of Tuesday.