Pl. CXXXIX in vol. 3 of Émile Prisse d’Avennes’ L’Art arabe d’après les monuments du Kaire depuis le VIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe, 1877. The plate shows the upper room of a private house in Cairo. A stucco and glass window with a cypress is flanked by a window depicting a green and red vase on each side. The flowers in the vase are also green and red and have yellow stems. The central cypress is green, with a yellow trunk and yellow stems with the same green and red flowers.

Émile Prisse d’Avennes published two illustrations from the ‘Maison Sidi Youçouf Adami’. He described this house, which – as far is known – no longer exists, as one of the most remarkable of Cairo and also made estampages of the stucco work (Fonds Prisse d’Avennes, Bibliothèque nationale de France). The stucco and glass windows are not inserted in a mashrabiyya, but in wall niches framed by polylobed arches.
The three windows show the widely used motifs of a cypress flanked by flower tendrils and a vase. Similar stucco and glass windows are preserved for example by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (93.26.1; IG_176) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (MES.LOST.32). However, Prisse d’Avennes depicts the vase and the cypress in an atypical way, with large pieces of glass.
Like many of the splendid panels from the Prisse d’Avennes’ publication, those with the stucco and glass windows were also used as sources for new artistic creations (see Keller, 2021, p. 521). For example, Rudolf Ernst (1854–1932) copied all three windows for his undated painting Les Captives (oil on panel, 36.9 by 45.8cm, at Christie’s New York on 25 October 1989; IG_153). Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) used the window with the vase, in the same atypically painted manner, for the window of the mosque in his painting, also undated, Rüstem Pasha Mosque Istanbul (IG_149).