This stucco and glass window is one of the few examples conserved in Western museum collections representing a peacock. The bird’s colourful plumage and its association with royalty and paradise make it one of the most popular motifs of art across time and cultures (Dittrich, 2005, pp. 348–360; Riese, 2007, pp. 328–329). The peacock is also a recurring motif in Islamic art (Daneshvari, 1994; Viré/Bear, 2012).
The enthusiasm for the bird’s exotic beauty and colourful plumage reached a peak in the Western arts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, where the peacock became one of the main motifs of Art Nouveau stained glass (Michel, 1986, p. 84).
This interest in the peacock motif is also manifest when it comes to stucco and glass windows. This is attested by sketches and paintings of qamariyyāt representing a peacock by John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876) and James William Wild (1814–1892). As in the window discussed here, they show the peacock from the side (IG_118, IG_119, IG_122, IG_125, IG_447, IG_449). The peacock motif was also reinterpreted in stucco and glass windows designed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Ottoman empire (IG_334) and in Europe (VMR_1387).
Although qamariyyāt depicting peacocks are rare today, the window discussed here finds a close counterpart in a specimen held at the MIT Libraries in Boston (IG_259). Both windows show the peacock in profile. The depiction of its head and tail, as well as the flower stem placed in front of the bird, show surprising similarities. However, due to differences in the way the design has been executed, the two windows were not necessarily made in the same workshop.
From a technical point of view, it can be assumed that the window discussed here was made in Egypt during the Late Ottoman period. According to the museum records, it dates to the 18th century. We assume however that the window was made at a later date, possibly around the time it was acquired by Robert Ware (see below). One reason for this hypothesis is the good state of preservation of the stucco lattice, which would have shown clearer signs of weathering if it had been installed and exposed to the elements for a longer period before purchase. Another reason for a later dating is the use of cylinder-blown flat glass (also called broad-sheet). In the Islamic world, sheet glass was usually produced using the crown-glass process, while in Europe, the broad sheet-method was the dominant technique to manufacture flat glass. The Hungarian architect Max Herz (1856–1819) states that sheet glass was imported to Egypt from Europe from the 19th century, because local production had come to a standstill (Herz, 1902, p. 53).
A hand-written letter dated 22 May 1893 to Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832–1904), the then director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provides information on the provenance of the window. The author of this letter, the American architect William Robert Ware (1832–1915), writes that he had acquired this and various other windows in the spring of 1890 from several well-known art and antiquity dealers in Cairo. He mentions [Gaspare] Giuliana, [E. M.] Malluk, [Nicolas?] Tano, and [Panayotis] Kyticas (on their commercial activities see Volait, 2021, pp. 60–64). In his letter, Ware further states that he was told that the windows ‘had been taken from old houses’ and ‘from old mosques, that had been dismantled’, but that he was not able to get ‘any precise information as to their original places’ (Ware, 1893).
In 1893, Ware donated this window as part of a lot of 17 qamariyyāt (IG_169, IG_171–186) to The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Ware, 1893).
