Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum

The Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum is an art museum in Giza, Egypt, housed in an early twentieth-century palace on the Nile. It holds one of the most significant collections of nineteenth-century French Impressionist and post-Impressionist art in the Middle East, assembled by the Egyptian statesman and collector Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. The museum opened to the public in 1962, was displaced for two decades by government use of the building, and reopened in 1995 after a full restoration.

Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil (1877-1953) purchased the palace in 1918. A major political figure, he served twice as Prime Minister of Egypt (1928-1929 and 1937-1939), was Minister of Agriculture in 1937, President of the Senate from 1939 to 1940, founder of the Cairo Society of Friends of Fine Arts in 1924, commissioner of the Egyptian pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition, and corresponding member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1948. He and his wife Emiline Lock, a French musician, amassed a major collection of French art. After Khalil's death in 1953, the family continued to reside in the palace until 1960. Emiline Lock's testament directed that the palace and collection be made accessible to the public. The museum was inaugurated on 23 July 1962 by Sarwat Okasha, the Egyptian Minister of Culture, and dedicated to the memory of Khalil and his wife. In 1971, President Anwar El-Sadat converted the building to executive offices, and the collection was moved to a neighboring palace in Zamalek. The palace returned to museum use in 1993, and the museum reopened in 1995 after the collection had been shown at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris in an exhibition titled Les Oublies du Caire (October 1994-January 1995). The museum then closed for ten years and reopened in June 2021 after complete renovation and security upgrades.

The museum contains more than 300 works, with a core of over 200 pieces. Its strength lies in French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, most acquired before 1928, which rival many European national collections in this area. The holdings also include sculptures by major European artists, Chinese vases, and some academic Orientalist paintings. The Egyptian State Information Service has estimated the total value of the collection at approximately five billion euros.

The collection features works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (including La vie et la mort, 1889), Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Johan Barthold Jongkind, and Paul Gauguin. Earlier French masters represented include Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, and Eugène Fromentin. The sculpture collection includes works by Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Louis Antoine Barye, and Charles Cordier. The museum also holds nine paintings of the nineteenth-century Egyptian ruler Ibrahim Pasha. The most notorious work is van Gogh's Poppy Flowers (also known as Vase and Flowers or Vase with Viscaria), painted in 1887 and valued at approximately 40 million euros. This painting was first stolen in 1977, recovered in Kuwait two years later, then stolen again in August 2010 when thieves cut it from its frame with a box cutter in broad daylight. It has remained missing since the 2010 theft.

The palace is a three-story building constructed in 1915 in the neoclassical and French Art Nouveau styles, though one source gives an earlier construction date of 1905 for the original hotel particulier built for the banker Raphael Suares. It is situated in the Dokki district of Giza, between Gezira Island and the Cairo University Bridge near the western bank of the Nile. The building served as a private residence from 1918 until its conversion to a museum, then as executive offices from 1971 to 1993, before returning to its present cultural function.

The museum is located in Giza Governorate, Egypt, in the Dokki district near the Nile. It is a state-run institution under Egyptian government ownership. After its most recent reopening in June 2021, the museum operates with upgraded security systems following the earlier thefts. The Egyptian government provides a virtual tour of the museum through its fine art website.