The museum, with its 8,000 works, includes paintings, drawings, engravings and old prints, sculptures, old furniture and decorative art, ceramics, glassware, as well as a numismatic collection.

When the missing works were discovered the Fine Arts Museums director, Jean de Maisonseul informed the French.

The Director of France's museums Henri Seyrig argued that returning the work, in accord with the Evian Agreements would continue to remind Algerians of their ties to France and would follow a foreign policy brief stating an intention to "foster the most extensive audience for our culture" as an extension of politics by other means.

The collection features : The Algiers Museum of Fine Arts was created by politicians at the end of the 19th century, during the period of French Algeria.

Originally it was in the dilapidated premises of the Société des beaux-arts founded by Hippolyte Lazerges in 1875 that the municipality of Algiers kept its works of art.

It was not until 1897 that it acquired a real museum, devoted to the ancient and Muslim collections, even though it was housed in the buildings of a teacher training college.

It was inaugurated on 30 May 1908 and this creation had been requested for a long time because the Fine Arts room that served as a museum was very badly laid out and could not contain the works acquired by the municipality.

Paul Guion opted for a symmetrical and rectilinear monumentalism whose architectural elements drawn from Mediterranean art were to be echoed in the admirable furniture designed and drawn by Louis Fernez, a professor at the National School of Fine Arts in Algiers, some of whose pieces were commissioned from the designer Francis Jourdain.

On Alazard's proposal, a special commission chaired by Paul Léon and whose main members were Mouillé, deputy director of the Beaux-Arts, Jean Guiffrey and Paul Jamot, curators of the Louvre, Raymond Kœchlin, president of the Conseil des musées nationaux, and Charles Masson and Robert Rey, curators of the Luxembourg Museum, decided on the definitive purchase.

Donors included former patrons such as Marius de Buzon or Jean Désiré Bascoules, great settlers such as Lucien Borgeaud, industrialists such as the painter Louis Billiard, or an amateur such as Laurent Schiaffino.

Among them, the famous Frédéric Lung owed his reputation not only to his early interest in the painters of the Villa Abd el-Tif but also to the rich collection of modern and impressionist works that he built up.

His widow bequeathed some pieces to the Algiers Museum of Fine Arts, in particular Charles Despiau's studio plaster, L'Homme prêt à l'action.

These representations allowed visitors to follow the evolution of the main artists who were originally from Algiers or who had been living there for a long time.

In this Europeanised Algiers, the Musée des Beaux-Arts functioned as an institution where cultured people did not feel out of place, but its atmosphere, which was subject to local particularities, also made it possible to detach oneself from the metropolis.

Jean de Maisonseul, appointed in November 1962 as curator of the museum (which became the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d'Alger) under the heading of cooperation, at the request of the Algerian Ministry of National Education, ensured the reopening of the museum in July 1963 and led lengthy negotiations that culminated in December 1968 in the restitution of the 157 paintings and 136 drawings - "even though from the outset André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, recognised that these works belonged to Algeria", he would specify.

Maisonseul, curator until 1970, simultaneously undertook through his acquisition policy to remedy the poverty of the Algerian art collection, introducing works by Baya, Benanteur, Guermaz, Khadda, Martinez and Bettina Heinen-Ayech to the museum.

The collection includes drawings, etchings, red chalks, watercolours, sketches, lithographs, illuminations, miniatures and calligraphy.