FINALLY: Figure on Led Zeppelin IV cover identified as Victorian Wiltshire thatcher.

The album’s cover artwork was radically absent of any indication of the band name or a title. The framed, coloured image of the stooped man, which has often been referred to as a painting, was juxtaposed and affixed to the internal, papered wall of a partly demolished suburban house. The back cover of the album was a block of flats, thought to be Salisbury Tower in Ladywood, Birmingham.

It is understood that the Led Zeppelin lead singer, Robert Plant, discovered a framed, coloured photograph of the original image of the Wiltshire thatcher in an antique shop near guitarist Jimmy Page’s house in Pangbourne, Berkshire.

The original image was discovered in a Victorian photograph album titled: “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.” It contained more than 100 architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural workers from Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset.

Beneath the stooped man’s image, the photographer wrote: “A Wiltshire thatcher.” Further research suggests the thatcher is Lot Long (sometimes Longyear), who was born in Mere in 1823 and died in 1893. At the time the photograph was taken, Long was a widower living in a small cottage in Shaftesbury Road, Mere.

Meanwhile, a part-signature matching the writing in the album suggests the photographer is Ernest Howard Farmer (1856-1944), the first head of the school of photography at the then newly renamed Regent Street Polytechnic, now part of the University of Westminster.

When do we crack the mystery of what Page’s “Zoso” symbol means?