A History of Cairo's Mr. & Mrs. Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum

What is it about?

A magnificent art nouveau structure overlooking the Nile, the Mr. & Mrs. Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum at no. 1 Kafour Street in Cairo was Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil’s gift to his wife Émilienne Luce, who bestowed the palace along with its possessions to the Egyptian government to preserve as a museum of art after her passing. Little is known about Mr. & Mrs. Khalil, the former residents of the palace for whom the museum is named, or about the history of the palace that they once inhabited, save for the reason behind its most recent ten-year closure—the theft of a painting by Vincent van Gogh in 2010. This essay traces a history of the Khalil Museum and its former residents, exploring details of their prized collection and the museum’s history of re-openings and closures.

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Photo by Nadine Nour el Din on Unsplash

Photo by Nadine Nour el Din on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Though it boasts one of the most significant art collections of the region, the Khalil Museum has been understudied, as are the histories of Mr. & Mrs. Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil. In examining the museum in its present state, several questions emerge around the history of the palace and its former inhabitants. Who were Mr. and Mrs. Khalil? How did they amass such an important collection? What works are in their collection and who looked after it? Who decided to turn their home into a museum? This essay explores the history of the Khalils' palace and art collection, shedding light on the establishment of the museum. The Khalil Museum is but one of many grand houses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region that have become museums, in a category of institutions referred to as “historic house museums.” It should be noted that the term “house museum” is not expansive, as the transposition of this category of museum comes with a Western assumption attached to imperial and colonial conceptions of collecting. The implications of this terminology ascribe the desire for collecting beautiful treasures and building wonder cabinets, palaces, and galleries to house them according to the practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Rather, I argue that such notions of collecting are not confined to Western characterizations and tend to exclude early modern examples and histories of collecting in the MENA region.