Rare picture found of reclusive Lady of the Lamp

Florence Nightingale as you have never seen her before

By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent

(Filed: 07/08/2006)

The popular image of Florence Nightingale is of an earnest Victorian woman, the model of austerity, always wearing a prim lace cap.

But a remarkable new photograph of her discovered in a long forgotten album has revealed a more carefree and romantic side to the Lady with the Lamp.

The heroine of the Crimean War and nursing reform was a recluse for much of her life and hated the camera. As a result, there is only a handful of photographs of her.


Although she reached the age of 90, dying in 1910, she sat for the camera only seven times - or so it was thought. The discovery of an unrecorded eighth sitting has thrilled the Florence Nightingale Museum, in London, which has just been given the new sepia-toned picture.

The image, thought to be a Daguerreotype print, shows the nurse at the age of 38 in the gardens of her parents' house, Embley Park, near Romsey, Hants, in 1858, two years after her return from the Crimea.

Although clearly posed, the picture shows her apparently happy and at leisure reading a book or a manuscript, wearing a flowing dark dress and without her lace cap - a marked contrast to the prim studio pictures of her.

Alex Attewell, the director of the museum, said: "It is a quite staggering find because it is not the face that she usually presented. This is her relaxed in a society at Romsey that she felt at ease with."

Mark Bostridge, the author of a forthcoming biography of the great reformer, said: "She was extremely reluctant to be photographed, being determined 'in no way to forward the making of a show' of herself, partly for religious reasons [she was a strict Unitarian] and because she regarded any personal publicity as detrimental to the causes of public health for which she worked so tirelessly."

The photographer was William Slater, the pharmacist in Romsey. The photograph was found after the death of his grandson, also William Slater, at the end of last year. The latter's executors discovered three albums of photographs of local dignitaries and personalities around Romsey in the mid-19th century.

Besides the picture of Miss Nightingale, carrying the inscription "F N at Embley", Slater's albums also contain photographs of her sister, Parthenope, a so-far unidentified young female relative, possibly a Bonham Carter cousin, and Lord Palmerston, whose estate at Broadlands was near by.

Miss Nightingale's diaries record that William Slater senior provided her with medical supplies for the Crimea and it is likely that they were close friends.

Mr Attewell says that his study of the diaries suggests that May 1858, when Miss Nightingale recorded that he had visited her family home with Sir John and Lady McNeill, supporters of her hygiene campaign, is the most likely date of the photograph.

The steps on which she is sitting at Embley Park, now a school, still exist, as does the urn, although it has been moved to another part of the gardens.

The picture also hints at sickness.

"Using a magnifying glass, you can see that her face is gaunt and her wrists are very thin," Mr Attewell said. "She is clearly not well."

Florence Nightingale was struck by a mysterious malaise in the Crimea. It was called "Crimean fever" at the time but has since been attributed to a psychosomatic illness, to ME and most recently to brucellosis. She never recovered from it.

Although she continued to work and write at a furious rate, she spent much of the rest of her life locked away in rooms in London, often in bed.

The photograph will go on public display at the museum, adjacent to St Thomas's Hospital, today, the 150th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's return from the Crimea.