On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released its legendary fourth studio album, which was untitled but widely known as “Led Zeppelin IV.” It features the band’s biggest hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” and the wordless cover features an image of a bearded, elderly man with a large bundle of sticks strapped to his back against the backdrop of a crumbling wall.
Now, 52 years later to the day, a little mystery surrounding this cover has been solved.
The image was sometimes mistaken for a painting, but it turned out to be a Victorian-era photograph of a man making thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwest England. According to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo, his name was Lot Long and he was 69 years old at the time.
Mr. Edwards, a visiting scholar at the University of the West of England, came across the image in March while searching the Internet for new auction house releases that might be of interest to his research, including the area’s well-known landmark, Stonehenge.
As he flipped through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a photo he had apparently seen before.
“I immediately felt something familiar,” 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 CD.)
After a quick call to his wife for a “health check,” he came to the conclusion: This was indeed the image on the cover of one of the most epic music releases of his teenage years. He then called Wiltshire Museum, where he curated an exhibition in 2021.
According to the auctioneer’s website, the museum purchased the photo album for 420 pounds (about $515).
The first page of the photo album reads “Memories of a visit to Shaftesbury” and it is marked as “Gift from Ernest to Aunt”.
Based on this information, Mr. Edwards researched the provenance of the photo album and concluded 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,” Edwards said. “I took some good breaks.”
How this photo ended up on the album cover: Legend has it that Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London on the Thames, where they discovered a colorized version of the photo, which will be on display at Wiltshire Museum.
Since the photographer, Mr. Farmer, was also a teacher, Mr. Edwards said, a plausible theory is that he used the image to teach his students how to color. One of these versions may have ended up in a frame in an antique shop. This colorized version of the image appears to have been lost.
According to the Wiltshire Museum, where the photos are exhibited, the photo album contained around 100 photos showing architectural views and street scenes, as well as some portraits of farm workers.
“We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of the people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, a neighboring county, which provided a stark contrast to his life in London,” the museum said in an announcement about the exhibition.
“Even if this Led Zeppelin photo wasn’t included, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs,” Mr Edwards said.