The watercolour An Apartment in the Harem of the Sheikh Sadat, Cairo by the British painter Frank Dillon (1832–1908) depicts a genre scene in an interior in the ‘house of Sheikh Sadat’. The artist visualizes the residence’s reception chamber (qā*ʿa), with the lattices of a wooden oriel (mashrabiyya*) and colourful stucco and glass windows with geometric motifs. He included some staffage in his painting to give scale (Tromans, 2008, p. 129): a clothed woman resting on a divan, and a barefoot man with a tray in his left hand serving her.

Dillon campaigned passionately for the preservation of Islamic architecture when the wave of modernisation imposed by Europe and the local dynasty in the mid-19th century threatened to destroy ‘old Cairo’ (Arnhold, 2008, p. 235). With a view to protecting and recording the city’s ancient buildings, Dillon produced accurate paintings of Cairene domestic interiors in the 1870s. The Cairene house of Sheikh Sadat was also portrayed in several other watercolours by Dillon (IG_100, V&A, 859-1900) and in a pencil drawing (IG_105). One of the watercolours (V&A, 859-1900) is dated 1873.
It was also recorded in contemporary photographs: an outside view of the courtyard taken by the French photographer Félix Bonfils in the 1870s (IG_477) captures the central window of the mashrabiyya of the building on the right, showing it to be largely broken. A photograph with a similar view of the house was taken by the Italian photographer Beniamino Facchinelli (1839–1895) (IG_478). In Dillon’s watercolour however, there is no indication of breakage, as the angle at which the interior is viewed does not reveal this central stucco and glass window.