This oil painting by the Scottish Orientalist painter Arthur Melville (1855–1904) depicts a genre scene with a man sitting on a divan smoking, in a richly decorated interior in Egypt. In the background, six coloured stucco and glass windows with geometrical motifs can be seen: the two outer windows feature interlacing rhombus-like motifs (reminiscent of the sebka ornamentation widely used in al-Andalus and the Maghreb). The two central windows feature geometric star ornament, and the two inner windows are decorated with curlicues and stylized flowers. The complementary colours blue and orange are prevalent in the painting: they can be seen in the stucco and glass windows, in the carpet on the floor, and the man’s garments.

In this painting, the Scottish Orientalist painter Arthur Melville (1855–1904) focussed his attention on the patterns created by strong sunlight falling through the latticed woodwork screens of the mashrabiyya, on the shades of colour created by the stucco and glass windows, and the scintillating surfaces of the interior (Tromans, 2008, p. 129). The painting was created in 1881 after a trip to Cairo and was subsequently exhibited at the the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh in 1883 as well as in Glasgow in 1886 (McConkey & Topsfield, 2015, p. 46).