LONDON, UK.- The National Portrait Gallery presented yesterday the only known oil painting of nurse Mary Seacole, known as the black Florence Nightingale. The work had been lost for several years. Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1805. Her father was a white Scottish and her mother was of mixed race. She overcame the treatment of women as inferiors but also the open racism of the era to make her way to the Crimea and nurse wounded soldiers. The painting was made by Albert Challen in 1869. The work was discovered by accident while as it was used as the backing for a framed print. She was awarded the British Crimean medal, the Turkish Medjidie and the French Legion d'honneur. Last year she was voted the greatest black Briton in a poll. She died on May 14, 1881 in London. The painting is the only known of Seacole and has been lent to the gallery to go on display from yesterday.