Flores de amapola

This small vase of poppies is famous less for what it shows than for how often it has vanished. Hanging in the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo, it was stolen in 1977 and turned up ten years later in Kuwait. Then in August 2010 it went again, in daylight. Thieves are said to have dragged a couch under the frame to stand on and cut the canvas free. Most of the museum's alarms were dead and only a handful of its cameras worked. An Egyptian court later convicted several culture officials of negligence. The painting, long linked to Van Gogh's late 1880s poppies though its attribution has been questioned, has not been recovered.