France is reeling after another important jewellery heist, this time from the Lalique Museum in Wingen-sur-Moder, where 27 jewels worth over $5 million were taken in a daring smash-and-grab raid. Read all the details below.
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Less than a year after the dramatic daytime heist at the Louvre in Paris, during which nine priceless jewels that once belonged to Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie were stolen, another daring museum robbery has rocked the jewellery world.
In the early hours of Sunday 5th July, three masked thieves broke into the Lalique Museum in eastern France, and used hammers and sledge-hammers to smash their way through several showcases in its exhibition hall.
The raid lasted just 11 minutes, during which time the robbers managed to take 27 glittering items from the museum’s 650-piece collection, including Lalique’s famous “Femme-libellule ailes ouvertes” (“Woman Dragonfly with Open Wings”) pendant, created in gold, diamonds and coloured enamel.
“Unfortunately, our magnificent ‘Woman Dragonfly with Open Wings’ pendant is among the items of jewellery that were stolen. Created by René Lalique around 1898 – 1900, it was the first piece acquired in preparation for the museum’s opening,” officials at the museum stated on its Instagram account. “The team was therefore particularly fond of it and hopes that it might one day be found. It was, in particular, the centrepiece of one of our tours for very young children.”
Alongside the dragonfly pendant, the museum confirmed that the thieves also took a number of brooches (including Lalique’s delicate Pansies brooch in gold, diamonds, enamel and glass), necklaces, bracelets, a choker, a bust, a perfume bottle, a comb, hatpin, ornate belt buckles and a pair of vintage handheld glasses. In total, 27 pieces of jewellery worth over 4.5 million Euros (over $5 million) was taken. The heist is now being investigated by Strasbourg’s Section de Recherches and France’s art-crime unit.
René Lalique (1860 – 1945) was a renowned artist, glassmaker and jewellery designer, who was considered one of the central figures of the Art Nouveau movement, which used fluid, sinuous silhouettes to celebrate the beauty of organic, natural forms such as vines, flowers, insects and feminine figures.
Lalique’s delicate jewellery, glass and crystal vases and perfume bottles remain highly sought after by collectors to this day. In April this year, a dedicated auction of his glassware and vases fetched over £530,000 ($710,926) at an auction by Lyon and Turnbull in central London, and in 2021 a sale of important Lalique pieces at Sotheby’s in Paris totalled 1.7 million ($1.9 million).
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