The Victorian painter John Frederick Lewis (1804–1876) sojourned in Cairo from 1841 to 1851 and inhabited a house in the Azbakeya quarter, probably the Palace of the Coptic Patriarchate. This palace was located in a street then known as Harat al-Rum, next to the ancient Coptic church of the Virgin Mary. The building was enlarged in 1781, but had not been used by the Patriarch since 1801. It no longer stands, and the street is now named Harat al-Zuwayla (Auber de Lapierre, 2017, p. 257; Volait, 2021, p. 142).
Frederick Lewis painted the house several times (see IG_118, IG_119, IG_122), as well as James Wild, who draw the house between 1844 and 1847 (see IG_449). Furthermore, Lewis’s friend the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray visited the house and wrote a short account about the dwelling (Thackeray, 1846, pp. 283–287).
The drawings by Lewis and Wild discussed here show one side of a qāʿa (reception room) with a large niche with mashrabīya screens with another mashrabīya screen on each side. Each screen has two rows of stucco and glass windows: three larger windows below, with two narrow windows above at the sides and three in the centre.

Auber de Lapierre, J. (2017). Le Musée copte du Caire, une utopie architecturale. Annales Islamologiques 50, pp. 235–266.

Thackeray, W. M. (1846). Notes of a journey from Cornhill to grand Cairo. London: Chapman & Hall.

Volait, M. (2021). Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850–1890. Leiden: Brill.