The Van Gogh cut from a Cairo museum wall

On Saturday 21 August 2010, while the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo was open to visitors, someone cut a small Van Gogh from its frame. The Art Newspaper says the canvas was cut with a knife. It showed yellow and red flowers in a vase against a dark ground. The press calls it Poppy Flowers or Vase with Flowers. Catalogues call it Vase with Viscaria.

Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil (1877 to 1953) was an Egyptian politician and collector. Martin Bailey, a Van Gogh specialist at The Art Newspaper, writes that Khalil bought the picture in Paris, quite possibly as early as the 1920s. After Khalil’s widow died in 1960, his house and collection passed to the Egyptian state as a museum. Bailey dates the painting probably to summer 1886. The BBC gives 1887. Catalogue sources give a size of 65 by 54 centimetres. Reports at the time gave about 30 by 30 centimetres.

Its authorship has also been questioned. Bailey reports that Ronald Pickvance, a British Van Gogh specialist, doubted it, while Louis van Tilborgh of the Van Gogh Museum accepts it. The work was never studied in depth and never left Cairo for an exhibition.

It had been stolen once before. The BBC dates that theft to 1977 and The Guardian to 1978. The collection was then in a temporary home, a palace in Zamalek, as President Sadat had taken the Khalil house for offices. The canvas was found in Kuwait. The Guardian says this was two years later. The BBC says a decade later. The Guardian reports that Egypt’s interior minister said three Egyptians had been arrested. It did not report whether they were charged.

After the second theft, the culture minister said airport security had seized the painting from two Italians. The next day he said the claim was inaccurate. On 22 August the public prosecutor toured the museum and called its security a facade. Egypt Independent reports that only 7 of 43 cameras worked, and that no painting alarm did. The BBC and The Guardian put its value at about 50 million dollars. That is a press estimate. The painting has never sold at auction.

Only negligence was prosecuted. Sources differ on how many people were charged: 15 in one report, 12 in another. On 12 October 2010 the Dokki Misdemeanors Court sentenced 11 Culture Ministry employees to three years. On appeal in April 2011, Reuters reported through Ahram Online, Mohsen Shaalan, the deputy culture minister who led the Fine Arts sector, received one year. The sector’s director general of security received six months. In May 2012 the Court of Cassation upheld both sentences. The sources differ on the museum director and the other staff. Egypt Independent and El Watan say their appeals were accepted and they would be retried. Ahram Online says they were jailed for six months. No one has been convicted of the theft itself.

The museum closed for about a decade. It reopened on 4 April 2021, and the Van Gogh was not on its walls. Bailey wrote that the painting had probably left Egypt again and that the chances of recovery look slim. The Art Newspaper confirmed in January 2025 that it had not been recovered. The latest dated report, from Al-Masry Al-Youm on 6 October 2025, says it is still missing, 15 years on.