A man stole a $1m (£760,000) painting from a Russian gallery in broad daylight after unsuspecting visitors assumed he worked there.

CCTV footage showed the young suspect calmly approaching the work of art on Sunday evening at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery as members of the public looked on.

After stopping to briefly look at the painting of a Crimean mountaintop, by Arkhip Kuindzhi, the man then brazenly lifted it off the wall and walked out.

Russian police said they had arrested a 31-year-old suspect and recovered the undamaged painting.

The work – titled “Ai-Petri. Crimea” – was discovered after a tip-off hidden at a building site outside Moscow, officers said.

During an interview with detectives investigating the theft the suspect denied he had committed any crimes and said he could not remember where he had been on Sunday.

Officials at the gallery said the painting had been taken from a temporary exhibition which did not have any alarms fitted.

Vladislav Kononov, an official at the Ministry of Culture, told reporters all pictures at the gallery would be fitted with sensors and alarms from now on.

The picture dates from 1908 and was completed shortly before Kuindzhi – a Russian realist landscape painter – died.

Russian state television reported “Ai-Petri. Crimea” was worth more than $1m. Other works by the same artist have sold for more than $3m at auctions.

It is not the first time the Tretyakov Gallery, one of Russia’s most renowned museums, has experienced an embarrassing lapse in security.

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In May a man attacked a famous 19th-century painting of Russia’s first tsar with a metal pole.

The attacker reportedly damaged the artwork, which showed Ivan the Terrible cradling his dying son, because he was enraged at its supposed historical inaccuracy.