The Persian verses on the left of this folio, written by the calligrapher Abdullah al-Husayni, are by the poet Sa’di (see cat. no. 1):

If the Friend [God] gives me a thousand lives
I shall throw them over your blessed feet
Every decree that you pass on my head
Is light, I shall not reject it
Though my house is miserable and dark
I shall show it to your luminous eyes
There is no light when, due to my estrangement from you,
I do not elevate my lament to high heaven
I know that tyranny is not permissible
Allow it [heaven] to hear my complaint.^[31] 

Instead of the ordered, enclosed garden of cat. no. 9, the figures here occupy a wild and open landscape setting and, in contrast to the Iranian aesthetic, the artist (again La'l) demonstrates a different aspect of his oeuvre in line with the Occidentalist style prevalent in Mughal painting of the 1580s and 1590s. Both figures wear long, high-waisted classical dresses with sandals on their feet. The lady on the right is seated on what appears to be a truncated classical column, although a distinctly Eastern large bolster cushion supports her from behind.

European ambassadors and missionaries often presented gifts of printed books and engravings, both religious and secular in content, to members of the Mughal court. Images of classical goddesses or muses were evidently made available to La'l. Here he not only emulates a style of classical Western attire, but his painterly treatment of the drapery clearly echoes the strong tonal contrasts of sixteenth-century European engravings. The townscape set in the distant background and the cat at the ladies’ feet are also elements typical of Northern Renaissance imagery which were subsumed into the Mughal visual language.