Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum

On a summer day in 2010 a man walked into a museum in Giza, cut a small Van Gogh out of its frame with a knife, and walked out. It was the second time the same painting had been taken from the same walls. It had vanished once before in 1977 and turned up again. This time it did not come back, and 'Poppy Flowers' is still missing.

The museum around that empty frame is the former Nile-side villa of Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil, an Egyptian politician who died in 1953, and his French wife. A regular in Paris, Khalil bought Impressionist and post-Impressionist pictures over decades, works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin and Degas, and sculpture by Rodin, one of the finest such collections outside Europe, assembled by a collector from the Arab world.

The villa reopened in 2020 after years of closure, its grand rooms hung again with the paintings that stayed, and a conspicuous gap where the Van Gogh used to be.