At 5:15 p.m. on Monday, three apparently middle-aged men — one carrying a bag from a shoe shop — walked into the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna and went to the second floor.

There, they walked up to “Golfe, mer, falaises vertes” — an 1895 painting of some green cliffs and the sea by Pierre-Auguste Renoir that was to be auctioned Wednesday for an estimated $131,000 to $181,000.

Then they took it out of its frame and walked out.

The robbery lasted just minutes. The men made next to no effort to hide their appearance.

The Vienna police were investigating, said Inspector Patrick Maierhofer, one of the force’s spokesmen, who provided the above account of the suspects’ actions, which were played out on closed-circuit TV footage. “It was very quick,” he said. “Nobody noticed.”