It is, quite frankly, amazing that no-one else spotted this before.
David Cameron, it turns out, was the empress of Russia in a previous life.
Sophie Gadd, a final year student at the University of York, on a trip to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, Germany, tweeted the picture to her followers. And suddenly everything made sense.
The 1794 oil on canvas image of Catherine II the Great, Empress of Russia, was painted by Johann Baptist Lampi.
Catherine ruled Russia between 1762 and 1796, often considered the Golden Age of the Russian Empire and the Russian Enlightenment.
Catherine is often held up by historians as the archetype of the "enlightened despot", a ruler who used her absolute power for benefit of the nation.
It was not known, until now, that she is almost definitely somehow related to the Prime Minister of Great Britain.