Watercolour on paper. 230 x 310mm. (9 x 12.2ins).

Aligarh was captured by the British in 1803 during the Second Maratha War. It later became the seat of the famous progressive Muslim University.

D'Oyly spent most of his forty years in India as a Company civil servant in Calcutta. Like the artist, George Chinnery (1774-1852), he "embodied the new romantic mood in art. He was a romantic artist in the sense that he presented India to his British contemporaries in romantic guise". J. P. Losty, Under the Indian Sky, British Landscape Artists, Bombay 1995.