The Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum is a museum in Greater Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

, in the Giza area, Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

. It is located in a palace built in the early 20th century.

History

The museum was opened on 23 July 1962, and dedicated to the memory of Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil Pasha and his wife Emiline Lock.

In 1971 it was sectioned by the government of Egypt; President Anwar El-Sadat used it for executive offices. The palace was returned to museum use in 1993.

Collection

Among the great artists works endowed by Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil and his wife are those of Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

, Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

 and Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

. The Museum houses a fine collection of Impressionist paintings, mainly collected before 1928, which alone rivals most European National Collections.

The museum has a poor reputation for looking after its assets. A Van Gogh painting known both as Poppy Flowers

Poppy Flowers

Poppy Flowers is a painting by Vincent van Gogh with an estimated value of $50 million to $55 million; it was stolen from Cairo's Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in August 2010 and is still yet to be found.Egyptian officials erroneously believed they had recovered the painting only hours after its...

 and Vase and Flowers was cut from its frame and stolen from the museum in August 2010. Previously, it had been stolen from the museum's temporary location in 1978, and recovered two years later in Kuwait. Nine paintings of the 19th century Egyptian ruler Ibrahim Pasha

Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt

Ibrahim Pasha was the eldest son of Muhammad Ali, the Wāli and unrecognised Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. He served as a general in the Egyptian army that his father established during his reign, taking his first command of Egyptian forces was when he was merely a teenager...

were stolen in 2009, and were found 10 days later dumped outside.

External links

• Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum Egypt State Information Service