This late-18th century Anglo-Indian School portrait of Charles Weston (1731-1810), a Eurasian of mixed British and Indian parentage, will be offered for sale at Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex on June 25-26.
Weston, the illegitimate son of a British lawyer in Calcutta, was apprenticed to the East India Company surgeon and landowner John Zephaniah Howell – best known today as the author of a key account of the horrors of the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta, a small dungeon in Fort William. Shrewd property investment allowed Weston – raised a committed Christian – to leave funds for the less well-off.