Lucky Find at Auction Identifies Man on Cover of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’
On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released its iconic fourth studio album, which was untitled but commonly known as “Led Zeppelin IV.” It features the band’s big hit, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and the wordless cover features the image of a bearded, older man with a large bundle of sticks on his back against the backdrop of a rotting wall.
Now, 52 years later, a small mystery about that cover has been solved.
Sometimes thought to be a painting, the image turned out to be a Victorian-era photograph of a man making thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwest England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 at the time, according to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo.
Mr Edwards, a visiting researcher at the University of the West of England, came across the photo in March while searching the internet for new releases from auction houses that might be of interest to his research, including the area’s well-known landmark Stonehenge. .
While looking through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards saw a photo that he had apparently seen before.
“There was something immediately familiar about it,” he said in a telephone interview. (Mr. Edwards was the proud owner of a “Led Zeppelin IV” LP from the year the album was released, he said, and he still listens to it to this day, albeit on a CD.)
After a quick call to his wife for a “health check,” he concluded: This was indeed the image on the cover of one of the most epic musical releases of his teenage years. He then called the Wiltshire Museum, where he organized an exhibition in 2021.
The museum bought the photo album for 420 pounds (about $515), according to the auctioneer’s website.
The first page of the photo album reads: ‘Memories of a visit to Shaftesbury’, and is formatted as ‘a gift for Ernest’s aunt’.
Based on that information, Mr. Edwards investigated the origins of the photo album and was able to conclude that the photographer was a man named Ernest Howard Farmer.
“It sounds like good detective work, but in reality there was a lot of luck involved,” Mr Edwards said. “I had some good breaks.”
As for how that photo ended up on the album cover, legend has it that Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they discovered a colorized version of the photo that will go on display at the Wiltshire Museum.
Because the photographer, Mr. Farmer, was also a teacher, Mr. Edwards said, a plausible theory is that he used the photo to teach his students coloring. One of those versions may have ended up in a frame in an antique store. That colorized version of the photo appears to have been lost.
The photo album contained about 100 photos of architectural views and street scenes, along with some portraits of rural workers, according to the Wiltshire Museum, where the photos will be on display.
“We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of the people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, a neighboring county, which were in such stark contrast to his life in London,” the museum said in an announcement about the exhibition.
“Even if this Led Zeppelin photo wasn’t in it, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs,” Mr Edwards said.