The design of this stucco and glass window consists of a green cypress tree surrounded by an S-shaped curved flower tendril, with tulips, lilies and roses. A flower stem with a rose, a lily, and red carnation adorns the lower right corner; red and yellow flowers decorate the inner side of the semicircular arch framing the motif. Two eight-petalled flowers are set in the spandrels above the arch. The cypress tree and the flowers are worked out in relief against a perforated background that lies c.10mm below the surface.

The latticework is painted with a light-brown colour and a dark varnish (see Research).

The window has been restored and is preserved without its original wooden frame (see Technique and Research).

Gypsum plaster; colourless glass; coloured glass (green, blue, two shades of yellow, and red flashed glass); ochre-coloured paint; varnish.

The stucco and glass window is preserved without its original wooden frame and is in good condition: the latticework is intact, and there are no glass losses.

According to the results of an in-depth examination of the stucco and glass windows of the Delort de Gléon Collection carried out in 2008, this, as well as the other windows from the collection, have been restored five times since their acquisition in Cairo (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–25).

The most recent restoration was carried out after this detailed examination, in 2009–2010 (Fellinger et al., 2022). During restoration, defects and losses in the stucco lattice were filled with white stucco plaster and missing glass was replaced. The new pieces of glass are embedded in a thin layer of off-white plaster on the back of the stucco grille. There are remains of the original grey embedding layer, which is more grainy and less pure than the repair plaster.

From a technical and iconographic point of view, this stucco and glass window corresponds to one of the standard types of qamariyya widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period. Similar windows can be found in several of the collections studied (see for instance IG_18, IG_173, IG_355). The representation of a cypress tree surrounded by a flower tendril is a widespread motif in Islamic arts. It can also be found in numerous other media, such as ceramics, wood panelling, wall paintings, and textiles, over a long period of time, and in both sacred and profane contexts.

Stucco and glass windows of this type are illustrated in 19th- and early 20th-century publications (see for instance IG_42, IG_47). The cypress tree motif also aroused the interest of Western artists and architects, as is attested by the significant number of sketches and paintings of the motif (IG_118, IG_136, IG_150, IG_153, IG_438, IG_439, IG_468), as well by the replicas of such windows installed in Arab-style interiors across Europe (IG_56, IG_57, IG_64, IG_427–IG_430).

The window from the Louvre discussed here stands out from other windows of the same type, owing to the remarkable quality of the design, which testifies to the skill of the craftsmen or women who made the window. The colours and material properties of the glass and the latticework – although heavily restored – suggest that the window dates to the late 19th century. This assumption is supported by the results of an analytical study of glass from two stucco and glass windows from the Louvre collection (OA 7466/7, OA 7466/25) conducted by a team from the Musée du Louvre (Fellinger et al., 2022).

As to its origin, the window is one of 39 qamariyyāt supposedly bought in Cairo by the architect Ambroise Baudry (1883–1906) for the French civil mining engineer and art collector Baron Alphonse Delort de Gléon (1843–1899) (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–24). They adorned the Ottoman salon of Delort de Gléon’s hôtel particulier, purchased in 1883, at rue Vézelay 18 in Paris (Volait, 2005, pp. 131–134; Volait, 2009, pp. 99–104, 130–135). This is confirmed by several historical photographs preserved at the Département des Arts de l’Islam (DAI) of the Musée du Louvre, which show the windows Inserted In the upper parts of wooden mashrabiyyāt (see Linked Objects and Images). The salon was designed by the baron himself in collaboration with the French architect Jules Bourgoin (1838–1908). The creation of orientalizing interiors, composed of original architectural elements and furnishings as well as replicas of the same, was a widespread practice among Western art collectors at the time (Giese, 2016; Volait, 2016; Giese, 2019).

Based on these photographs and the presumed date of the windows, one may assume that the windows were created especially for Delort de Gléon’s Arab-style interior and had never been part of a historical building in Cairo. The complete history of these windows however, including possibly multiple reuses and several restorations, is difficult to reconstruct. Based on the unpublished study by Bailly et al. (2008) and our own observations, it seems that most of the windows have been cut from their wooden frames. Extensive repairs to the stucco grille, as well as the partial or complete replacement of the thin plaster layer for embedding the pieces of glass at the backs of the panels, are proof of several restoration campaigns. It is likely that the light-brown (ochre-coloured) paint on the inside of the stucco grille is not original but was applied around 1922 in preparation for the display of the window in the exhibition rooms of the Louvre, with the intention of adapting the windows to their new surroundings (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–24). The brown varnish applied on top of the paint is probably also the result of a restoration campaign, possibly before the Louvre exhibition in 1977, and may have been applied to match the colour of the wooden mashrabiyya in which the windows were displayed.

After the death of Delort de Gléon, the stucco and glass windows passed into the possession of his wife, Marie Augustine Angélina Delort de Gléon, who bequeathed them – as part of Delort de Gléon’s collection of Islamic art – to the Musée du Louvre in 1912 (Delort de Gléon, 1914).

Mentioned in:

• Roux, 1977, p. 295.

• Sotheby’s, 2010, p. 197, no. 303.