This impressive and colorful painting depicts a warm evening in the zenana (women's quarters) as a semi-conscious princess - lying eye-closed and legs-crossed on an outdoor floral-carpeted terrace bed under a canopy, is fanned by a handmaiden. A kneeling musician softly plays her vina. They are accompanied by o𒊎ther zenana members who affectionately converse, play music and drink int🎃oxicating liquor from small cups - as another somewhat inebriated young lady is helped to walk by her companions. The composition with its geometrically rhomboid-shaped gardens (charbagh) filled with

rows of red roses and a nearly vertical terrace with a line of verdant trees and distant pond filled with lively water birds may be seen as a wi♍ndow into the languid, playful and luxurious life-style of the members oᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚf the royal Mughal household.

Another somewhat earlier painting with the same subject and composition, once in the Archer Collection, was illustrated in Mark Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, 1983 London, pl. no. 225, which bears an inscription identifying the princess as Zib al-Nisa' Begum (d.1703) a daughter of t🍸he Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. And another later version of the same composition is in the National Museum, New Delhi (accession number: 54.61/7). The present painting can be dated to the 19th centu𓃲ry given its vibrant color palette and stout paper support.