Elongated, rectangular stucco and glass window with a cypress tree surrounded by winding tendrils with three-petalled flowers. The motif is set against a perforated, slightly recessed background.

Coarse-grained gypsum plaster; colourless glass (with a greyish, greenish or purplish tint); coloured glass (two shades of blue, three shades of green, several shades of yellow including of orange, red glass with a brownish tint, probably flashed glass)

The stucco latticework has been repaired. Losses were filled with a fine-grained, buff-coloured material (plaster?). The back of the window also shows repairs. The repairs involved replacing missing or broken pieces of glass and filling losses in the thin plaster layer in which the pieces of glass are embedded.

There are small traces of blue paint on the front of the latticework.

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). The representation of a cypress tree surrounded by a flower tendril 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 of this type are illustrated in 19th- and early 20th-century publications (see for instance IG_42, IG_47). The cypress tree motif also aroused the interest of Western artists and architects, as is attested by the significant number of sketches and paintings of the motif (IG_118, IG_136, IG_150, IG_153, IG_438, IG_439, IG_468), as well as by the existence of several replicas of windows with this motif in Arab-style interiors across Europe (IG_50, IG_59, IG_64, IG_427–430).

The window discussed here, however, stands out from most qamariyyāt of the same type due to its oblong format and the small size of the cypress tree. In contrast to the windows IG_2 or IG_258 and IG_260, which represent individual windows, the example from the MET was probably part of a composite window. The rough design and inferior technical qualities of the latticework substantiate this hypothesis.

According to the museum records, the window dates to the 17th century. However, the good state of preservation of the stucco lattice raises doubts about this early dating. If the window had actually been installed in a building in the 17th century, we would have expected to observe clearer traces of weathering.

A hand-written letter dated 22 May 1893 to Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832–1904), the then director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provides information on the provenance of the window. The author of this letter, the American architect William Robert Ware (1832–1915), writes that he had acquired this and various other windows in the spring of 1890 from several well-known art and antiquity dealers in Cairo. He mentions [Gaspare] Giuliana, [E. M.] Malluk, [Nicolas?] Tano, and [Panayotis] Kyticas (on their commercial activities see Volait, 2021, pp. 60–64). In his letter, Ware further states that he was told that the windows ‘had been taken from old houses’ and ‘from old mosques, that had been dismantled’, but that he was not able to get ‘any precise information as to their original places’ (Ware, 1893).

In 1893, Ware donated this window as part of a lot of 17 qamariyyāt (IG_169, IG_171–186) to The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Ware, 1893).