This stucco and glass window shows symmetrically arranged flower and star ornamentation composed of eight-petalled flowers that are inscribed within eight-pointed stars. Four-petalled floral motifs are set between the eight-pointed stars.

The latticework is painted dark brown (see Research).

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

The plaster layer on the back of the panel in which the pieces of glass were embedded has been replaced twice (see State of Conservation and Restorations).

Gypsum plaster; coloured glass (green, blue, dark yellow, two shades of flashed red glass; brown paint

The stucco and glass window is in good condition: the plaster lattice is intact, there are fissures and small losses on the front of the latticework. The glass does not show any losses or defects.

According to the results of an in-depth examination of the stucco and glass windows in the Delort de Gléon Collection carried out in 2008, all the windows have been restored five times since their acquisition in Cairo, involving the reinforcement of the fragile plaster lattice with textile, probably cotton fabric (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–25, 32). The fabric, which is perforated according to the design, was inserted between the back of the latticework and the glass and fixed to the panel with glue. In the process, the original plaster layer fixing the pieces of glass to the back of the panel was completely removed – together with the pieces of glass – and replaced with a new plaster embedding layer for the pieces of glass. Small patches of this off-white plaster are preserved on the back of the panel. There are no remains of the original plaster layer.

Despite these repairs, the window was in very poor condition at the time of the examination in 2008 (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–25). The thin stucco layer on the back of the panel and the pieces of glass as well as the textile inlay had come loose. During the last restoration in 2009–2010 (Fellinger et al., 2022), it was decided not to reapply the textile inlay. The loose pieces of glass were reattached to the back of the stucco lattice with a thin layer of white stucco. Missing pieces of glass were replaced; the new pieces are incised with the date ‘2009’.

This stucco and glass window corresponds iconographically and technically to one of the standard types of qamariyya widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period. Windows of this type have arousen the interest of the British architect James William Wild (1814–1892), who captured several such windows schematically during his stay in Cairo in the years 1844–1847 (IG_436, IG_440, IG_448).

Symmetrically arranged flowers and stars are a recurring element of Islamic ornamentation across time and media. However, the insertion of a flower within a star is uncommon in the western Islamic world (al-Andalus and Maghreb), where star ornamentation is always restricted to purely geometric forms (IG_170, IG_363, IG_364, IG_366). This distinction supports the geographical classification of the window.

Several qamariyyāt within the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris have not only identical ornamentation, but also an identical distribution of coloured glass (IG_12, OA 7466/13, OA 7466/14), which suggests that they were produced at the same workshop and are most probably part of a larger group. In contrast to the other windows of this group, the Louvre window discussed here has three parallel rows of flowers and stars and therefore occupied a more prominent position within a window composed of several panels. An almost identical qamariyya was documented by the Italian photographer Beniamino Facchinelli (1839–1895) at the Museum of Arab Art in Cairo (IG_206). It may be possible that the window discussed here was copied from the one exhibited at the Cairene museum.

The colours and material properties of the glass and the stucco 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 provenance, 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 the photographs mentioned 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 possible 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 two complete renewals of the thin plaster layer for embedding the pieces of glass at the back of the panel, are evidence of repeated restoration. It is likely that the dark-brown paint on the stucco lattice is not original, but was applied during restoration, with the intention of adapting the windows to new surroundings.

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