This pencil and watercolour drawing showing a round stucco and glass window was made by František Schmoranz on 3 February 1870, when he was in Cairo. The drawing was left unfinished, as the stucco lattice is only partially drawn, and some light pencil lines for the construction of the pattern are still visible. Furthermore, only a few coloured pieces of glass are shown with red, green, blue, and yellow paint, while the stucco is not coloured at all. In addition to the frontal view, in the upper left corner the drawing includes a small cross-section of part of the window showing the different heights of the stucco surface.
The round window is structured with a central main section surrounded by four curved cartouches. While most of their surface is left blank, an Arabic inscription in yellow on a background of small blue dots is shown fragmentarily. In the middle of the round main section a rosette is placed within an eight-pointed star. Its outlines continue and form geometric shapes that contain individually positioned palmettes. Here too, dots in the background indicate small circular perforations in the stucco surface.

According to the date next to František Schmoranz’s signature, the drawing was made on 3 February 1870, when Schmoranz was in Cairo. This is one day after he made a drawing of a rectangular stucco and glass window in the same mosque (IG_418). Unlike the drawing made the day before, this work seems like an unfinished draft. Presumably it was made quickly on site with the option to finish it later, for which Schmoranz included all the necessary information, such as the colour of each element and the overall design, in which elements that were probably symmetrically repeated could be added at a later stage.

A caption locates the window to ‘Cairo. Ghama. Esbekh. (Schebak)’, probably referring to the Mosque of Mamluk Amir Azbak al-Yusufi. Drawings by Schmoranz showing different views and architectural details of this mosque were included in the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Historische Ausstellung des islamitischen Orientes. Umfassende Darstellungen von Cultus- und Profanbauten’ curated by Schmoranz in the k.k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna in 1876. There the building is called mosque and funerary monument of Esbeki-Bey in Cairo and dated to the 15th century (‘Moschee und Grabdenkmal Esbeki-Bey in Cairo. XV. Jahrhundert’; Schmoranz, 1876, p. 3).