Lucky find at auction identifies man on ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ cover

On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released their popular fourth studio album, which had no title but was widely known as “Led Zeppelin IV”. It features the band’s hit song “Stairway to Heaven,” and the wordless cover features an image of a bearded older man carrying a large set of sticks on his back against the backdrop of a crumbling wall.

Now, 52 years later, a simple mystery surrounding this cover has been solved.

It is sometimes thought to be a painting, but it turns out the picture was from the Victorian era of a man who was making thatched roofs for country houses in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwest England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 years old at the time, according to Brian Edwards, the researcher who found the photo.

Mr Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, found the image in March while searching the internet for new releases at auction houses that might be interesting for his research, which includes the area’s famous Stonehenge landmark. .

As he leafed through a Victorian photo album filled with landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a picture he seemed to have seen before.

“There was something familiar about it right away,” he said in a phone interview. (Mr. Edwards has been the proud owner of “Led Zeppelin IV” since the year the album was released, he said, and he listens to it to this day, albeit on CD.)

After a quick call to his wife to “check her sanity,” he concluded: This was indeed the image on the cover of one of the most epic music releases of his teenage years. He then called the Wiltshire Museum, where he has curated an exhibition in 2021.

The museum purchased the photo album for 420 pounds sterling (about 515 dollars). According to the auctioneer’s website.

The first page of the photo album refers to ‘Reminiscences of a Visit to Shaftesbury’, presented as ‘A Present to Auntie from Ernest’.

Based on this information, Mr. Edwards researched 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 it was a lot of luck,” Mr Edwards said. “I’ve had some good breaks.”

As for how that photo appeared on the album cover: Legend has it that Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antiques shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they discovered a tinted copy. From the photo that will be displayed in the Wiltshire Museum.

Since the photographer, Mr. Farmer, was also a teacher, Mr. Edwards said, one plausible theory is that he used the photo to teach coloring to his students. One of these versions may have ended up framed in an antique shop. This color version of the image appears to have been lost.

The photo album included about 100 pictures showing architectural and street scenes along with a few pictures of rural workers, according to the Wiltshire Museum, where the pictures will be displayed.

“We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of the people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, a neighboring county, which were in stark contrast to his life in London,” the museum said in an announcement of the exhibition.

“Even if that photo of Led Zeppelin wasn’t in there, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs,” Mr Edwards said.