The watercolour Recess in the Reception Room in the House of the Mufti Sheikh el Mahadi, Cairo by the British painter Frank Dillon (1832–1908) depicts a genre scene in a private domestic house in Egypt. It shows a man with a white turban sitting on a divan in a window recess and smoking. A barefoot servant holds a golden jug on a tray in both hands to serve the seated man. The bright interior is richly decorated with wood, stone, and tiling. The walls are divided horizontally into two zones: a lower zone with blue and white tiles, a painted wall cupboard, and wood-screens, through which an exotic landscape with palm trees can be seen, and an upper zone, in which coloured stucco and glass windows are depicted.

This watercolour by the British painter Frank Dillon (1832–1908) was widely disseminated at the end of the 19th century: under the title Nische aus der Ka’a des Mufti (Schech el-Mahdi), it was reproduced in 1880 as a wood engraving after a photograph of the original watercolour by Dillon in the second volume of Aegypten in Bild und Wort (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Hallberger 1880, vol. 2, p. 87) (IG_151) by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers (1837–1898). As per the title, this genre scene is set in the ‘House of the Mufti’ in Cairo – so named because it was owned by the supreme mufti of Egypt, Sheikh al-ʿAbbasi al-Mahdi (1827–1897) between 1847 and 1886 (Llewellyn, 1998, p. 154). Dillon also depicted the ‘House of the Mufti’ in another watercolour (IG_98). In a broader context, the ‘House of the Mufti’ became a popular painting subject for artists travelling to Egypt during the 19th century. It was painted, for example, by the Swiss architect Theodor Zeerleder (1820–1868) (IG_471, IG_473), František Schmoranz (1845–1892) (IG_415), and Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904) (Palastinterieur in Kairo, 1876, oil on board, 88 × 70cm, Lenbach-Nachlass im Familienbesitz, reproduced in Baranow 1986, p. 130). The house was also documented in a contemporary photograph by an anonymous artist, in which a stucco and glass window is partially visible on the right side of the picture (IG_476).