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.