Meet the other Florence Nightingale

A photograph of a graceful young woman reading in the shade, wearing a splendid silk dress, has been identified as a previously unknown image of Florence Nightingale taken in May 1858 at her parents' home in Hampshire. The image is worlds away from the best known studio photographs of a stern, unsmiling woman wearing a lace cap - and equally remote from sentimental artists' impressions of the "lady with the lamp" flitting through the military hospital wards at Scutari.

It survived in an album owned by the photographer William Slater, a chemist and passionate amateur photographer who was invited into most of the grand homes of the neighbourhood, including that of prime minister Lord Palmerston. Florence Nightingale trusted him, having ordered medical supplies from him to take to the Crimea in 1854.

Mr Slater's great-great-grandson, also William, died in December. His beneficiaries have donated the album to the Florence Nightingale Museum in London. "This is a Florence we don't know much of, at home in her parents' house, possibly dressed in her best to please her mother," the director, Alex Attewell, said.

"We have a dress of hers at the museum, and it is aggressively plain ... But this was taken less than two years after she returned from the Crimea, and I think if you look closely at the line of her jaw you can see the strain of what she has been through."

(The Guardian)