Solving the lighting problem

This time I rendered my scene with another area light in the background so that the ground would not appear too dark and look closer to the kind of lighting emitted by my background image.

In addition, I found out that when you save the image you need to make sure 'save colour-managed image' selected to make sure the image colour is accurate to that of Maya's render. I also changed the image based lighting from 'raw' to 'sRGB' which gave it more depth of colour:

Now the ground is visible which is good, this render is much closer to what I was trying to achieve! :)