Unidentified daguerreotypist / Henry Wyndham Phillips (artist)
1852 (painting)
Daguerreotype of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace

Daguerreotype
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
On loan to the Bodleian Libraries. Reproduced by courtesy of G.M. Bond
 
Sold at auction: Bonhams London, 9-19 June 2025, Online auction, Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts, Lot: 81
 
Only known photographs of Ada Lovelace in Bodleian Display, 14 October 2015 (Accessed: 21 August 2021)
Professor Ursula Martin CBE, University of Oxford
 
…poignant daguerreotype, by an unknown photographer, is a photograph of a small portrait of Ada Lovelace, frail and thin, painted by Henry Wyndham Phillips in the last months of her life, when she was in great pain from uterine cancer. Her husband recorded progress on the portrait in his diary - on 2 August 'she managed to remain long enough when he came for him to make some progress', on 3 August that he was 'getting on with the portrait', and on 13 August that though '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'. The Bodleian archives contain a note written in her last days, in which she leaves 'a daguerreotype from Philips's portrait of me' to her mother's friend, Miss Montgomery.
 
LL/112987