View in Behar, in an Anglo-Indian Album associated with Sir Charles D'Oyly

Sir Charles D'Oyly

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Born to English parents in Bengal, D’Oyly followed his father into the civil service. By 1820 he was the East India Company’s opium agent and commercial resident, or tax collector, at Patna, on the Ganges River in Bihar, northeast India. An avid and accomplished amateur artist, whose "pencil like his hookah-snake was always in his hand," D’Oyly established a lithographic press that he operated between 1828 and 1831 with the help of Indian assistants. This fine representation of the press’s output shows the Bodhi Tree at Bihar, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. It is mounted in an album that was assembled in India by 1828.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art