Travellers on Elephants passing through a wooded mountainous landscape in Bihar

D'Oyly first arrived in India in 1797 and spent his first years in Calcutta before becoming Collector in Dacca from 1808-1818. He was both a friend and pupil of the artist George Chinnery. He then took up the post of Opium Agent in Patna. Due to the undemanding nature of his work, he was able to devote a great deal of time to his art. In 1827 he established one of the earliest lithographic presses in India. He encouraged both the artistic activities of Company School artists and his friends and would then produce these works in a periodical called Behar Amateur Lithographic Scrap Book which he printed and published himself. D'Oyly also published among other books, Tom Rawe the Griffin, 1828.
Although D'Oyly's style is strongly based on that of Chinnery, his hilly landscapes of Bihar, show a return to the earlier influences of Richard Wilson (1714-1782), the founder of the English landscape school, whose drawings were said to have hung in his drawing room at Patna.