Detailed, freehand, and lined drawing showing an elaborate vase. The left half of the design is coloured, whereas the right half is only executed in outline. Handwritten annotations and a section of the planned window are added on the lower right side of the cartoon.

The drawing is signed at the bottom left.

Upper right corner missing

Full-size construction drawing of the vase represented in the centre panel of the replicas IG_484 and IG_486, designed by the British architect William Burges (1827–1881) for the Arab Room of Cardiff Castle in Wales on behalf of John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847–1900).

The drawing is signed by the British architect and brother-in-law of William Burges, Richard Popplewell Pullan (1825–1888), who completed the Arab Room after Burges’s death in April 1881 (Newman, 1995, p. 205). The detailed depiction of the vase with technical annotations concerning the execution of the windows attests that Pullan faithfully followed his brother-in-law’s designs.

The latter are reminiscent of one of the standard types of qamarīya documented in the Ottoman empire. For its design, Burges relied on his on-site observations, made during a trip to Istanbul in the summer of 1857, when he visited various mosques, among them the Süleymaniye Camii, with its refined stucco and glass windows (Burges, 1858, p. 89, see IG_189). During his stay, Burges made colour drawings of the windows. One of the drawings was published in 1904 by Burges’s friend George Aitchison (1825–1910) to illustrate the Islamic tradition of stucco and glass windows in his contribution on ‘Coloured Glass’, issued in the XIth volume of The Architecture Journal (Aitchison, 1904, fig. 1; IG_91). When compared with Pullan’s construction drawing, we find clear references to the depicted window.

In the 19th century, stucco and glass windows with the vase motif were much appreciated by Western artists and architects, as is attested by a significant number of book illustrations, sketches, and paintings (see for instance IG_43, IG_118, IG_149, IG_153, IG_437, IG_443, IG_461), as well as by replicas integrated into Arab-style interiors across Europe (IG_54–57, IG_64, IG_431, IG_264, IG_371–375).

The drawing discussed here is part of a lot of five designs held at the Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff, which correspond to the replicas installed in the upper part of the Arab Room. Whereas IG_501, IG_502, IG_504, and IG_505 show the windows of the north and south side (IG_484, IG_486), IG_503 represents the centre panel of the windows located on the east and west side (IG_485, IG_487). IG_505 is the only design holding a signature by the British architect and brother-in-law of William Burges, Richard Popplewell Pullan (1825–1888), who completed the Arab Room after Burges’s death in April 1881 (Newman, 1995, p. 205).