A painting seized in Serbia has been confirmed as a stolen masterpiece by French impressionist Paul Cezanne worth €82 million.

The painting is Cézanne’s The Boy In The Red Vest and has been verified by the EG Buehrle Foundation, said Swiss prosecutors.

It was stolen from a private Swiss museum in 2008 in one of the biggest art thefts in Europe, along with three other masterpieces by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas. Monet’s Poppy Field at Vetheuil and van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches were discovered undamaged in a car parked at a mental hospital in Zurich soon after the robbery.

The heist was carried out by three armed and masked men who witnesses said spoke German with a Slavic accent.

Serbian police arrested three people in connection with the robbery.

Police raids and the arrests in the capital of Belgrade and in the central city of Cacak were conducted in co-ordination with police from several European countries. Art experts say the robbers took advantage of a low-security museum without knowing about the paintings or how difficult it can be to sell such well-known stolen art works.

Cézanne’s painting alone was worth €82 million when it was stolen. The other painting still missing is Degas’ Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter, worth about €8.2 million .

The robbers took the first four paintings they reached when they raided the museum shortly before closing time on a Sunday.

Although the most valuable painting was among the ones they took, they left behind the second most precious picture in the room, Cézanne’s Self Portrait with Palette, insured for £6 million (€7.2 million).

The influential French painter

• Paul Cézanne’s work forms the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

• Cézanne often used repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes.

• His early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted.

• Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists enormously.

• Among his most famous works are The Card Players (1892), The Lake at Annecy (1896), Still Life With Cherub (1895) and Les grandes baigneuses (1900-05).