Tysoe Saul Hancock, his wife Philadelphia, their daughter Elizabeth and their Indian maid Clarinda

In the summer of 1765 a surgeon home from Bengal booked sittings with the busiest portrait painter in London. Tysoe Saul Hancock had spent years in the service of the East India Company. His wife Philadelphia and their daughter Elizabeth sat to Reynolds first, in August, and Hancock came on 1 October with Clarinda, the Indian servant who had travelled to England with the family. For roughly two centuries nobody standing in front of the picture knew any of that. It passed as a portrait of Lord and Lady Clive with a child and a nurse until the 1970s, and the sitters were only identified in 2017, by the scholars Charlotte and Gwendolen Mitchell. Philadelphia Hancock was an aunt of Jane Austen, born ten years after these sittings.