After a decade of closure, the Mr & Mrs Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo has reopened. A spectacular Art Nouveau structure overlooking the Nile, the museum is open to the public with entry free of charge for the duration of this month.
Ines Abdel Dayem, Egyptian Minister of Culture, described the museum as an enrichment of Egypt’s cultural infrastructure and soft power, inaugurated the museum as he site of one of the world’s rare artistic collections. The museum opened with an aim of developing artistic, archaeological and national museums in Egypt, and to encourage public engagement.
The Museum boasts a significant collection of Impressionist, Romantic and Classical works, including pieces by world renowned artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Eugène Delacroix and Peter Paul Rubens among others. The collection also includes a number of porcelain vases and antiques from France, Turkey, Iran and China. Though the Khalils’ collection is predominantly an international one, there are a number of works by Egyptian artists.
Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Bey (1877-1953), was a politician and an avid collector. He was the president of the Egyptian Senate, a minister of agriculture and the co-founder of the Society of Lovers of Fine Arts. Khalil worked towards enhancing the cultural exchange between Egypt and France, organising the Egyptian pavilion at the Paris International Fair in 1937 and being elected a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1949.
The museum was closed for ten years following the theft of a Van Gogh painting known as Poppy Flowers (1887), cut from its frame and stolen in August 2010 and still missing. Poppy Flowers was also stolen from the same museum in 1977 but recovered a decade later.