The design of this stucco and glass window consists of a green cypress tree flanked on either side by a flower stem with five and six-petalled blossoms. The decorated area is surrounded by a segmental arch, which is indicated by a thin incised line. The spandrels above the arch are undecorated. The cypress tree and the flowers are worked out in relief against a perforated background that lies 10mm below the surface.

Gypsum plaster; colourless glass (with a green tint); coloured glass (green, blue, yellow, purple, several shades of red flashed glass); wood

This stucco and glass window is preserved in its original frame. The front of the stucco lattice is dusty and shows only superficial losses. Only a few pieces of glass are missing. There are no signs of repair.

From a technical and iconographic point of view, this stucco and glass window corresponds to one of the standard types of qamariyya widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period. Similar windows can be found in several of the collections studied (see for instance IG_18, IG_173, IG_355). In contrast to these windows, the cypress tree in this example is flanked by two flower stems rather than entwined with flower tendrils. A comparable design, but with two flanking carnations instead of the flower stems, can be seen in a window of supposedly Egyptian origin that is held today at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig (IG_499).

The cypress trees is a widespread motif in Islamic arts. It can be found in numerous other media, such as ceramics, wood panelling, wall paintings, and textiles, over a long period of time, and in both sacred and profane contexts. Stucco and glass windows representing this motif are illustrated in 19th- and early 20th-century publications (see for instance IG_42, IG_47). The large number of paintings and drawings of stucco and glass windows with this motif demonstrate the great fascination of Western artists and architects for such windows (e.g. IG_118, IG_136, IG_150, IG_153, IG_438, IG_439, IG_468). The growing interest is also evidenced by the existence of several replicas of such windows installed in Arab-style interiors across Europe (IG_50, IG_59, IG_64, IG_427–430).

From a technical and iconographic point of view, it can be assumed that this window was made in an Egyptian workshop during the late Ottoman period. This hypothesis is supported by the results of the analysis of stucco fragments from this window. The stucco lattice is made of a relatively coarse-grained plaster with many inclusions, including charcoal and brick particles. The properties of the plaster suggest artisanal production in smaller workshops like those that still exist in Egypt and the Maghreb today. The assumption of an Egyptian provenance is further confirmed by the results of the chemical analysis of a green piece of glass from this window. The glass shows relatively high concentrations of magnesium and potassium, suggesting that plant ash was used as a fluxing agent. The use of plant in glass production was particularly common in the Islamic world. In Europe, industrial soda ash was the usual flux in the production of sheet glass from the 18th century onwards. Somewhat contradictory, however, is the fact that some of the pieces of glass show the characteristics of cylinder-blown sheet glass (also known as broad-sheet), a technique that was unusual in artisanal glass production in Egypt, but widely used by the European glass industry. It is therefore possible that some of the coloured sheet glass used in this window was produced in a European glass-house. Interestingly, the Hungarian architect Max Herz (1856–1819) states in 1902 that sheet glass was imported to Egypt from Europe from the 19th century, because local sheet glass production had come to a standstill (Herz, 1902, p. 53).

According to the MIT Libraries’ records, this window was acquired by the Boston architect Arthur Rotch (1850–1894) together with three other qamariyyāt (IG_258, IG_259, IG_261) in the 1860s or 1870s. However, since he was still of a young age in the 1860s, we assume that he bought the windows at a later date. All four windows show the incised segmental arch and undecorated spandrels. These similarities support the assumption that they once formed a group of windows probably made in the same workshop. Traces of weathering on the surface of the latticework suggests that the window was exposed to the elements.

Arthur Rotch studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1872 to 1873, when the American architect William Robert Ware (1832–1915) was head of the newly created Architectural School. Just as other MIT students, Rotch was a trainee at his teacher’s architectural firm, and he continued working at Ware & Van Brunt as a draftsman after completion of his studies in 1874 (Chewning, 1979, p. 26). Interestingly, William Robert Ware also had a collection of stucco and glass windows. He had purchased them in 1890 on the art market in Cairo. In 1893, he donated 17 qamariyyāt to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see IG_169, IG_171–IG_186). Due to the lack of documentation, it can only be assumed that the one knew about the other’s collection. It also remains unclear where Arthur Rotch’s enthusiasm for stucco and glass windows came from. After Rotch’s death, his sister Annie Lawrence Rotch (1850–1926), wife of Horatio Appleton Lamb, donated all four windows to the Department of Architecture at MIT as part of the Rotch Art Collection.