Ada Lovelace photographs at Bonhams

June 11, 2025 admin Ada Lovelace, Bonhams, Lord Byron, photography

The only known photographs of mathematician, computing pioneer, and the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) will lead Bonhams’ Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale, running online from now until June 19, 2025.

The series of three photographs, two by Antoine Claudet and one by an unknown photographer, has an estimate of £80,000-120,000.

A photograph of the mathematician Ada Lovelace — A rare photograph of Ada Lovelace. Credit: Bonhams

The photographer Antoine Claudet (1797-1867) learned photography from Louis Daguerre in the late 1830s, before establishing his first daguerreotype studio in London in 1841 behind St Martin-in the-Fields church. Subsequent studios were at Regent’s Park and finally Regent Street. Claudet photographed several other scientists including Babbage, Faraday, and Sir Charles Wheatstone, and it is likely that one of them recommended him to their friend Lovelace.

A photograph of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron — One of the photographs of Ada Lovelace, the daughter and only legitimate child of Lord Byron. Credit: Bonhams

These daguerreotypes by Claudet were taken around the critical year 1843 when Lovelace published her celebrated paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In it she described in table form the use of punched cards to calculate Bernoulli numbers – often dubbed ‘the first computer programme’. Her comment that ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretension whatever to originate anything,’ has also been said to anticipate debates on artificial intelligence.

A photograph of Ada Lovelace — Credit: Bonhams

The third daguerreotype is by an unknown photographer and reproduces a painting by Henry Wyndham Phillips (1820-1868). His father Thomas produced the iconic portrait of Lovelace’s father Byron in Albanian dress. Lovelace sat for Henry Phillips in August 1852, and in the intervening decade since the Claudet photographs, her already fragile health had worsened. She was suffering horrifically from the uterine cancer that would end her life that November. Seated at a piano, she is gaunt and in a laudanum-induced daze – her husband William remarking in his diary that “the suffering was so great that she could scarce avoid crying out”, yet “she sat at the piano some little time so that the artist could portray her hands”.

Matthew Haley, Managing Director of Bonhams Knightsbridge and Head of Bonhams UK Books & Manuscripts Department, commented: “Though there are other depictions of Ada Lovelace, these are the only known photographs of this astonishing computing pioneer. They are an exciting and exceptionally important survival, and we expect a great deal of interest.”