Pl. 38–39, a colour plate in Alfred Normand's L'architecture des nations étrangères. Études sur les principales constructions du parc à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris (1867), published in 1870 in Paris by A. Morel, éditeur-libraire, shows a lunette-shaped stucco and glass window of the Tunisian pavilion at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
A carved stucco band with repeating geometric forms and (at the top) an inscription imitating Arabic letters surrounds the central stucco lattice. It is perforated by geometric forms around big twenty-four-pointed stars and smaller eight-pointed stars. The pieces of coloured glass are yellow, blue, green, and red. The illustration also shows the three-dimensionality of the stucco lattice by depicting the angled stucco perforations by means of shading.
Underneath the illustration, a scale shows that the window is of great size, with a radius of about 90cm.
The caption describes the stucco and glass window as a ‘fermeture des fenêtres en plâtre découpé à jour et vitrail’.

The caption to the illustration mentions the name of Alfred Normand. This leads us to the assumption that he was the creator of the original drawing which was reproduced through chromolithography by Walter and the Parisian firm Lemercier & Cie. In his text however, Normand informs the reader that some of the plates depicting the Tunisian pavilion reproduce drawings made by Arabs and sent to Paris (Normand, 1870, p. 11).

It is notable that stucco and glass windows of this typology are a very consistent feature of Tunisian representations at world’s fairs. Already at the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, Tunis exhibited a stucco window with an arch resting on engaged columns, with carved spandrels and perforations in the central stucco field forming a geometric pattern around pointed stars (IG_410). The same typology can be found at the International Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1883 (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1277-1883). At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, the Tunisian pavilion included windows of this typology again, as photographs show (IG_92).
In addition to the window from the Amsterdam Colonial Exhibition preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, several windows of this typology that entered the collection of the Orientalische Museum in the 19th century (now in the MAK Vienna: IG_362, IG_363, IG_364, IG_365, IG_366, IG_367, IG_368) demonstrate the availability of this type of stucco and glass window in 19th-century Europe.

The publication gives no information as to exactly where the stucco and glass window depicted was positioned in the Tunisian pavilion. From a photograph of the pavilion’s exterior (IG_452), it seems clear that the window depicted corresponds to the lunette windows positioned above the mashrabiyya oriels at the main-floor level.