Slideshow: the stolen pictures

Armed robbers have escaped with Impressionist paintings valued at almost £85 million in one of the world’s biggest art raids.

It took masked men only three minutes to steal four paintings from a private museum in Zurich. They burst into the building on Sunday afternoon and ripped the four paintings from the walls so quickly that 15 visitors upstairs were not even aware that a robbery was taking place until the alarms started to howl.

The paintings are part of an important collection of Impressionists and postImpressionists put together by Emil Bührle, a manufacturer who built his fortune selling the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun to Nazi Germany.

The robbers, wearing ski-masks and dark clothing, forced the security guards and other employees to lie on the floor. The only man to talk spoke German with a Slavic accent and guarded staff with an automatic weapon. Two others grabbed the paintings: Cézanne’s The Boy in a Red Vest (1890), Degas’s Viscount Lepic and his Daughters (1871), Monet’s Poppies Near Vetheuil (1880) and Van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches (1890).

“They formed the central part of the collection,” said Lukas Gloor, the director of the Bührle Collection. “The Boy in a Red Vest is one of the best-known pictures of Paul Cézanne.”

The paintings were loaded into a battered white car, which sped through the gates of the compound. Speed was essential, since the paintings were wired to a state-of-the-art alarm system. Police assume that the car was stolen and quickly dumped. Zurich airport was put on alert and the Swiss-Italian border is being monitored closely. One of Switzerland’s attractions for art thieves is its proximity to so many European frontiers.

The theft is deeply embarrassing for Switzerland, where police are still searching for clues to trace two Picassos,Tete de ChevalandVerre et Pichet, stolen last week from a culture centre in nearby Pfaeffikon.

Swiss authorities admitting grudgingly yesterday that they might have been hit by the worst peacetime European art raid. Some experts were comparing it with the 1990 theft of a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and other works – valued then at about $300 million – from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

“The situation is difficult,” Peter Rügger, the chief investigator, said. In fact it is a humiliation for a country that prides itself on its discretion and sense of security.”

Dr Johannes Nathan, a Swiss art expert, said: “It is like a knife driven into the heart. I just hope that the paintings are not damaged.”

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