A lady, seated on a cushioned seat on a terrace in the evening, is being serenaded by a woman with a vina while an attendant brings a covered dish of sweetmeats. A balustrade beyond and a screen of trees occludes the view. The moon appears in the evening sky above. Although a purely 18th century subject, the heavy and very detailed modelling, the colour scheme and the treatment of sky, vegetation and textile designs indicate that this is the work of a fine artist from the Mughal style of painting in Delhi in the early 19th century.

While many of the better artists had left Delhi by 1765 for safer and more rewarding cities elsewhere, some court artists remained in the beleaguered city, especially after the return of the Emperor Shah 'Alam in 1772, in order for artistic production to be resumed so readily after the Company's takeover of the city in 1803. Falk and Archer (T. Falk, and M. Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London, 1981) assign a small number of paintings to Delhi in the last quarter of the eighteenth century but readily admit that some of them might have been executed elsewhere.

Portraiture both of the imperial family and others was the first sort of painting to revive after 1803 in a new style (see for example J.P. Losty, and M. Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire - Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library, London, 2012, pp. 202-2; and W. Dalrymple, and Y. Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012, nos. 28-36). During this period in Delhi, many artists practised reviving the skills of the great Mughal painters by copying their work and creating new paintings in an archaistic style as seen in the Wantage and Kevorkian Albums, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively (see S.C. Welch, et. al., The Emperor's Album', New York, 1987). In our painting, a Delhi artist has created a terrace scene derived from the mid-18th century style of artists such as Govardhan II and Fath Chand (T. Falk, and M. Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London 1981, nos. 173, pp. 201-202).

Our painting has been mounted like many other late Mughal paintings created at this time in a version of the imperial album pages of Shah Jahan with their distinctive floral borders. A Hindi classification has been added, 'accha' meaning 'good', presumably a reference to the classification system of the Mughal library in which 'awwal' meaning 'first class' in Persian was appended to manuscripts and sometimes to paintings (see J. Seyller, 'The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library' in Artibus Asiae, vol. LVII, 1997, pp. 243-349).