The oil painting Eavesdropping by the British Orientalist painter Frank Dillon (1832–1908) shows a genre scene with two men sitting in an interior smoking; to the left a woman, hiding in a doorway in the wall, looks into the room. The interior is richly decorated with white and blue ceramic tiles, intarsia marble panels, and a wooden wall cupboard. In the lower part of the wall, there are wooden lattices, while in the upper part three colourful stucco and glass windows can be seen: the window above the doorway features the motif of a stylized cypress tree with an illegible inscription in Arabic letters above it. On the left-hand side, two more windows are represented: one with the motif of a stylized vase of flowers, and a second, which is only partially depicted, whose motif cannot be clearly discerned.

In his oil painting Eavesdropping, Dillon appears to have combined elements from the so-called ‘House of the Mufti’ in Cairo – of which he made a detailed study in his watercolour Interior of the House of the Mufti Sheikh El Mahadi, Cairo (IG_98) – and his own studio in Kensington, which was illustrated in the second volume of Georg Ebers’s Aegypten in Bild und Wort (IG_117): individual architectural elements, such as the recess with an open door on the left, being similar to those in Dillon’s watercolour (IG_98), appear to derive from the Cairene house, while a window with the motif of a cypress tree and an Arabic inscription can be seen in the illustration of Dillon’s studio in England (IG_117).