This pencil and watercolour drawing by the British architect James William Wild (1814–1892) depicts two rectangular stucco and glass windows. The window on the left side shows stylized architecture flanked by two cypress trees, and the window on the right features tendril ornament. Wild has indicated the outlines of further windows in fine pencil drawing on this sheet and added notes in fine pencil. The letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ can be read above the coloured window on the right-hand side.

Several drawings made by Wild in the 1840s bear witness to his intensive study of stucco and glass windows in Cairo; they are held today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the upper left-hand corner of this drawing, Wild has added a fine pencil note that reads ‘Windows in the mandarah of the Beyt Sheik Mahdee’, indicating that the windows were situated in the ‘House of the Mufti’ in Cairo – so named because it was owned by the supreme mufti of Egypt, Sheikh al-ʿAbbasi al-Mahdi (1827–1897) between 1847 and 1886 (Llewellyn, 1998, p. 154). Wild also treated windows located in this Cairene house in two other drawings (IG_436, IG_437).