A Stolen Picasso Just Turned Up During a Drug Raid Near Paris, Reportedly Taken From a Storage Facility

The painting has been authenticated but not revealed. Reports suggest it is one of Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 24, 2026 4:37 p.m.

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French police investigating drug trafficking recently raided a house outside of Paris. They found bundles of cash, cannabis, designer clothes—and a stolen Picasso painting.

The artwork, which has been authenticated but not revealed, is worth tens of millions of euros, France’s police force tells Le Parisien’s Denis Courtine, Florian Loisy and Théo Uhart. The raid took place last week in Champigny-sur-Marne. The house in question reportedly belongs to the aunt of a suspected drug dealer, reports Le Parisien.

The unseen painting reportedly depicts Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of Picasso’s most famous models. The Spanish artist met the blonde on the streets of Paris in 1927. She was a teen and he was 45. Picasso watched Walter emerge from the depths of the subway and thought she “had an interesting face,” reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Tessa Flemming in 2023. The artist later claimed he’d dreamt of Walter before they met.

“He took me to his studio,” Walter recalled, per the Art Institute of Chicago. “He looked at me, he seduced me. He kept looking at my face. When I left he said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ And then afterwards it was always ‘tomorrow.’”

Walter became both Picasso’s artistic muse and lover, though he was married to ballerina Olga Khokhlova. In 1932, Picasso created a series of portraits of Walter, including the career-defining Femme à la montre (which sold at auction for $139 million in 2023), The Dream (Le Rêve) and Nude in a Black Armchair (Nu au fauteuil noir).

“This is the person who’s already been through the Blue and Rose periods. He pioneered Cubism with Braque, he painted some of the most beautiful and assured paintings and drawings,” Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, said in 2023. “He was, arguably, the most famous and accomplished living artist in the late 1920s when he met Marie-Thérèse. In hindsight, this time with her is seen as one of the crowning periods of his career.”

Along with the portraits, Picasso made sculptures of Walter—reviving a medium he’d abandoned for two decades. She continued to inspire him, even after he started a relationship with Dora Maar soon after Walter gave birth to Picasso’s daughter.

Four people were arrested in relation to the drug trafficking case, reports Vincent Noce for the Art Newspaper. One of them confessed in court to stealing from a storage facility in Paris where he worked as a security guard.

The theft of the painting seems like it was “opportunistic,” a police source tells the Art Newspaper “and, as it often happens in such cases, the gang had no idea what to do with it.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.