Stolen £700,000 Degas painting found on a bus near Paris

French customs officers making a random check on a bus at a motorway layby found a painting by 19th century Impressionist master Edgar Degas that was stolen nine years ago from a museum in Marseille.

The 1877 painting Les Choristes, or The Chorus Singers and sometimes called  The Extras, was found in a suitcase in the vehicle’s luggage compartment during a stopover in Marne-la-Vallée to the east of Paris.

Its value is estimated at €800,000 (£700,000).

But when the officers asked passengers who the case belonged to, they were met with a stony silence, the culture ministry said in a statement.

“Its disappearance represented a heavy loss to the French impressionist heritage,” said Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen, who issued a statement saying she was delighted at “the happy rediscovery of a precious work.”

The colourful pastel, measuring 13 inches by 10, was on loan to the Cantini museum in Marseille from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris for an exhibition featuring some 20 works by Degas when it was stolen in 2009.

When the customs officers opened the suitcase on Friday of last week they were surprised to find a work of art bearing the signature "Degas".

They handed it over to art experts who said their preliminary examinations showed it was the Degas painting that depicts a depicts a line of men singing in a scene from the opera Don Juan.

The inquiry into how it came to be on the bus has been handed over to OCBC, the French agency which investigates art thefts. Les Choristes went missing on the night of 31 December 2009 from the museum in the southern port city.

There were no signs of a break-in, leading police to believe it was an inside job or that a museum visitor had hidden and waited till the venue was shut before unscrewing the work from the wall and escaping.

Maurice Di Nocera, the city councillor responsible for organising major events in Marseille at the time, called the theft "a disaster for the museum."

The city’s embarrassment was compounded when local police mistakenly told media the work was worth €30 million. The painting was quickly added to Interpol's database of stolen works of art, but until last week the trail was cold.

The confirmation of the find comes as a major exhibition about Degas’ relationship with the dancers at the Paris Opera closes at the Musée d'Orsay this weekend after attracting nearly half a million visitors.

"It is a wonderful happy ending to the story," said a spokeswoman for the museum, which holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist art.

"It is the centenary of his death, and we are organising a huge show about Degas and the opera for 2019. It would have been a terrible loss for us to do it without this painting," she told AFP news agency.