WORLD : Soviet’s Rousseau Work Stolen

MOSCOW — A masterpiece by the 19th-Century French painter Theodore Rousseau has been stolen in a daring heist from a museum in the central Soviet city of Penza, it was reported today.

The work, “Before a Thunderstorm,” was taken from the Central Picture Gallery in Penza, an industrial city of 540,000 about 450 miles southeast of Moscow. It had been hanging there since 1891.

Rousseau (1812-1867) was a leader of a group of landscape painters known collectively as the Barbizon School. “Before a Thunderstorm” is a prized example of his depiction of nature as a wild and undisciplined force.

“The crime is an extraordinary one,” Yuri Igonin, deputy chief of internal affairs, told Sovietskaya Rossiya newspaper. He said there was a sloppy response to the heist by the local militia, who responded to the break-in alarm by merely telephoning the guards at the gallery.