This stucco and glass window shows symmetrically arranged floral ornamentation within a rectangular double frame in red and blue. A six-petalled flower, composed of six three-petalled flower stems emerging from the middle, occupies the centre of this repeating floral ornamentation. The flowers are set within a perforated background. Smaller six-petalled flowers set within irregular hexagons fill the spaces between the large flowers. The outlines of flowers are worked out in relief against a perforated background.
The latticework is painted dark brown (see Research).

The window has been restored and is preserved without its original wooden frame (see Technique and Research). The window is reinforced with a layer of textile inserted between the stucco grille and the plaster layer on the back of the panel in which the pieces of glass are embedded (see This stucco and glass window shows symmetrically arranged floral ornamentation within a rectangular double frame in red and blue. A six-petalled flower, composed of six three-petalled flower stems emerging from the middle, occupies the centre of this repeating floral ornamentation. The flowers are set within a perforated background. Smaller six-petalled flowers set within irregular hexagons fill the spaces between the large flowers. The outlines of flowers are worked out in relief against a perforated background.

The latticework is painted dark brown (see Research).

The window has been restored and is preserved without its original wooden frame (see Technique and Research). The window is reinforced with a layer of textile inserted between the stucco grille and the plaster layer on the back of the panel in which the pieces of glass are embedded (see State of Preservation and Restorations).

Gypsum plaster; colourless glass; coloured glass (green, blue, two shades of dark yellow; two shades of flashed red); brown paint; textile (jute fabric)

The stucco and glass window is in good condition: the plaster lattice is intact, there are only a few fissures and very small losses on the front of the latticework. The glass does not show any losses or defects.

According to the results of an in-depth examination of the stucco and glass windows in the Delort de Gléon Collection carried out in 2008, all the windows have been restored five times since their acquisition in Cairo, involving the reinforcement of the fragile plaster lattice with textile, jute fabric in this case (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–25, 32). The fabric, which is perforated according to the design, was inserted between the back of the latticework and the glass and fixed to the panel with glue. In the process, the original plaster layer fixing the pieces of glass to the back of the panel was completely removed – together with the pieces of glass – and replaced with a new plaster embedding layer for the pieces of glass. There are no remains of the original plaster layer. To further stabilize the latticework, the edges of the panel were reinforced with textile bands.

The most recent restoration was carried out after this detailed examination, in 2009–2010 (Fellinger et al., 2022). In the course of this restoration, several pieces of glass were replaced; the new pieces are incised with the date ‘2010’.

This stucco and glass window corresponds iconographically and technically to one of the standard types of qamariyya widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period. However, sexfoil ornaments with flowers are far less common than other floral and geometric compositions. Nevertheless, a picture taken by the Italian photographer Beniamino Facchinelli (1839–1895) at the Museum of Arab Art in Cairo (IG_206) confirms the occurrence of this type of windows in the Egyptian capital. Even though the qamariyya represented on the photograph is much more elaborate than the Louvre window discussed here, both of them show a symmetrical distribution of sexfoils and flowers that create a repeating pattern.

Several qamariyyāt within the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris havenot only ornamentation identical to that of the window discussed here, but also an identical distribution of coloured glass (OA 7466/25, IG_26; OA 7466/26), which suggests that they were produced at the same workshop and are most probably part of a larger group. As IG_38, the three qamariyyāt of this group were installed at the centre of a window composed of several panels. The colours of the glass and the material properties of the latticework – although heavily restored – suggest that the window dates to the late 19th century. This assumption is supported by the results of an analytical study of glass from two stucco and glass windows from the Louvre collection (OA 7466/7 and OA 7466/25) conducted by a team from the Musée du Louvre (Fellinger et al., 2022).

As to its provenance, the window is one of 39 qamariyyāt supposedly bought in Cairo by the architect Ambroise Baudry (1883–1906) for the French civil mining engineer and art collector Baron Alphonse Delort de Gléon (1843–1899) (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–24). They adorned the Ottoman salon of Delort de Gléon’s hôtel particulier, purchased in 1883, at rue Vézelay 18 in Paris (Volait, 2005, pp. 131–134; Volait, 2009, pp. 99–104, 130–135). This is confirmed by several historical photographs preserved at the Département des Arts de l’Islam (DAI) of the Musée du Louvre, which show the windows inserted in the upper parts of wooden mashrabiyyāt (see Linked Objects and Images). The salon was designed by the baron himself in collaboration with the French architect Jules Bourgoin (1838–1908). The creation of orientalizing interiors, composed of original architectural elements and furnishings as well as replicas of the same, was a widespread practice among Western art collectors at the time (Giese, 2016; Volait, 2016; Giese, 2019).

Based on the photographs mentioned and the presumed date of the windows, one may assume that the windows were created especially for Delort de Gléon’s Arab-style interior and had never been part of a historical building in Cairo. The complete history of these windows however, including possibly multiple reuses and several restorations, is difficult to reconstruct. Based on the unpublished study by Bailly et al. (2008) and our own observations, it seems that most of the windows have been cut from their wooden frames. Extensive repairs to the stucco grille, as well as the complete replacement of the thin plaster layer for embedding the pieces of glass at the back of the panel, are proof of several restoration campaigns. It is likely that the ochre paint on the stucco lattice is not original, but was applied during restoration, with the intention of adapting the windows to new surroundings.

After the collector’s death, the stucco and glass window passed to his wife Marie Augustine Angélina Delort de Gléon, who bequeathed it as part of Delort de Gléon’s collection of Islamic art to the Musée du Louvre in 1912 (Delort de Gléon, 1914).