LONDON.- The National Portrait Gallery today launches, with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Art Fund, an appeal to acquire for the nation the earliest known British oil painting of a freed slave, and the first portrait that honours a named African subject as an individual and an equal. Never before seen in public, and currently on temporary display at the Gallery, this portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (c.1701-73) (known when he was in England as Job ben Solomon), shows the sitter painted in 1733 in his traditional dress wearing his copy of the Qur’an around his neck. The portrait, from a private collection, was sold at auction in Christies in December, and is now under a temporary export bar. The Gallery needs to raise £554,937.50 to secure this important and compelling painting for future generations by 25 August 2010, after which time it is