A YOUNG French art lover who became one of the world’s most successful thieves is expected to tell a Strasbourg court that a passion for beauty drove him to steal paintings and artworks from the museums and galleries of Europe.

The exploits of Stéphane Breitwieser, 33, stunned the art world in 2002 when he admitted that he alone stole 239 works, including masterpieces by Pieter Brueghel, Watteau and Dürer, and other items worth tens of millions of pounds that vanished between 1995 and 2001 from seven countries.

Embarrassed curators of the small museums favoured by Breitwieser had believed that they were the victims of a cunning gang.

The “gentleman thief”, as the media dubbed Breitwieser, was returned to his native Alsace from Switzerland last July after serving three years in prison for the theft of 69 works there.

Breitwieser, a hotel employee who became a passionate collector, took impeccable care of his haul in his home in the Alsacian village of Gerstheim.

However, after his arrest in 2001 the most valuable items were lost when Mireille Stengel, his mother, took an axe to what she called his bric-a-brac. She shredded the canvases in a waste-disposal unit and dumped much of his collection in the nearby Rhine-Rhone canal. Antiques worth £6.5 million were retrieved from the water, including baroque chalices, ivory carvings and a silver galleon.

Among the dozens of artworks destroyed were The Princess of Cleves by Lucas Cranach, which was taken from Sotheby’s in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1995; Cheating Benefits its Master, by Peter Brueghel, stolen from a museum in Antwerp in 1997; and Le Patre Endormi by François Boucher and a portrait of James V’s first wife, Madeleine of France, by Corneille de Lyon, which were both taken from a museum in Blois in 1996.

Mme Stengel, 53, is on trial with her son and with Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss, his ex-girlfriend. Both are charged with receiving. During the Swiss trial it emerged that Mme Stengel destroyed the art as an act of revenge against her son, who was described by experts as an immature, over-protected only child.

In their verdict in February 2003, the judges in the canton of Gruyères noted that Breitwieser had never sold a work. “His taste for art was not base or materialist. It was above all the love of art and not money or the act of stealing that drove him to take these works,” they said.

Breitwieser, who was the grand-nephew of Robert Breitwieser, a well-known Alsacian artist, acquired his passion as a child when his parents took him on visits to museums.

After failing to reach the Louvre fine arts school, he took a two-year diploma in hotel management while learning everything he could about art. His parents’ divorce at the time deeply upset him, the Swiss court was told. In a letter to Roland Breitwieser, his father, a business executive, he said he was drawn into theft by frustration, knowing that he could never afford the works that he admired in the salerooms.

Borrowing his mother’s BMW convertible and elegantly dressed, he toured poorly guarded provincial museums around the Continent posing as a collector. He was at first amazed at the ease with which he could cut a painting out of its frame and stuff it in a backpack, or steal larger objects when guards’ backs were turned. At the Chateau de Gruyères he removed a 17th-century 16 sq m tapestry woven in Flanders.

Unable to carry it, he threw it out the window and recovered it later from the moat.

The thief’s bravado proved his downfall. He was arrested in November 2001 when he returned to the Richard Wagner museum in Lucerne only two days after stealing a hunting horn worth £40,000. A guard recognised him and called the police.

Breitwieser, who is reported to have been co-operating with the French investigating judge, faces only a maximum three-year jail term after the two-day trial. As a condition for extraditing him, Switzerland insisted that he be charged with simple theft.

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