The prevailing belief is that he was born in Koutifari of Mani in the Peloponnese, but in 1664/1665 his family settled in Zakynthos, which was then under Venetian occupation. There, in 1685, he received lessons in religious painting by Cretan painter Leo Mosko. His first known works include the icon of Christ as an Archpriest, created in 1691 for the Lady of Angels in Zakynthos, which was later painted over by Nikolaos Koutouzis. From 1694 to 1699, he took part in the wars of Venice against the Ottomans, and for this reason he was honored with the medal of Knighthood and, later, granted pieces of land on the island of Lefkada. At the turn of the century and up until 1704 he lived in Italy, where he most probably studied painting. Upon his return, he settled in Venetian-ruled Kalamata, where he remained until 1715, i.e. the year when the area came under Turkish occupation. In 1719 he painted, by Western standards, the “Portrait of Count Matthias von der Schulenburg” (Athens, private collection), the German commander-in-chief of the Venetian forces during the siege of Corfu by the Turks (1714-1718). This work, which is signed and dated, along with his "Portrait of Schulenburg" of the collection of the E. Koutlidis Foundation (1725), are among the very few works that are undoubtedly attributed to the artist. In 1727, he painted seventeen compositions for the ceiling of the church of Saint Spyridon in Corfu, which were later replaced by copies created in 1853-1871 by N. Aspiotis. Two of his eight children, Nikolaos and Dimitrios, also turned to painting.
Apart from painting, Doxaras was also active in the study, translation and drafting of theoretical texts about art. Thus, in 1720, in Italy, he translated the treatise of Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura and, in 1724, he added to the work relevant texts by Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Pozzo, et al. In 1726, he completed the work Peri zografias (On painting), which was until recently considered to be an original treatise, but newer research proved it to be an anthology of translations of 17th- and 18th-century Italian texts.
The theoretical and artistic work of Panagiotis Doxaras, which essentially launches Ionian painting, also marks the starting point of modern Greek art as a whole, thanks to the detachment from the Byzantine and post-Byzantine tradition and the adoption of the principles of western European painting, both at the level of technique and style and of the broader understanding of art.

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  The Archangel Michael
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  Κόμης