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Secondary sourcePainting2011-06-22

Woodcut-Style Portrait of Ada Lovelace after Chalon

Colin Adams · 2011-06-22

A modern black-and-white illustration reworking the 19th-century Chalon portrait of Ada Lovelace into a woodcut style.

A modern decorative reworking of the historic Chalon portrait, used to depict Lovelace's likeness in a stylized form.

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Black-and-white ink illustration in an ornate oval frame with scrollwork at top and bottom. A woman with hair in side buns and flowers, wearing a patterned shawl, looks over her shoulder. A ribbon below reads 'ADA LOVELACE'.
Colin Adams, Woodcut-style portrait of Ada Lovelace after Chalon, 2011.

About this source

What it is

This is a black-and-white ink illustration created by Colin Adams in 2011, based on the nineteenth-century portrait of Ada Lovelace painted by Alfred Edward Chalon. It is set within an ornate oval frame and labelled 'ADA LOVELACE' on a ribbon below.

Why it matters

This illustration is a later artistic reinterpretation rather than a historical document from Lovelace's own time. It shows how her image, first captured by Chalon, continues to be reproduced and reimagined in different styles long after her death.

Look closer

  • What changes when a painted portrait is turned into a woodcut-style illustration?
  • Why might an artist choose an ornate, decorative frame for this kind of portrait?
  • What can and can't this image tell you about who Lovelace really was?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Ada Lovelace on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Scanned page titled 'Diagram for the computation by the Engine of the Numbers of Bernoulli. See Note G (page 722 et seq.)'. It is a dense table with columns for operation number, nature of operation, variables acted upon and receiving results, data and working variables, and results, filled with rows of symbols, formulas and numbers.Document

Primary source

Note G

Ada Lovelace · 1843

Title page of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a romaunt, by Lord Byron. Black-letter heading, an epigraph in French attributed to Le Cosmopolite, and imprint: London, printed for John Murray, 32 Fleet-Street; William Blackwood, Edinburgh; and John Cumming, Dublin, 1812. Aged cream paper.Book

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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Lord Byron · 1812

Watercolour portrait of a young woman with dark hair in side ringlets and a headdress of dark flowers and a yellow blossom. She wears a black lace shawl over a lilac dress with a gold fan and white gloves, against a grey-brown background.Painting

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Watercolour Portrait of Ada Lovelace

Alfred Edward Chalon · c. 1840

Full-length oil portrait of a young woman in a white satin gown with puffed sleeves and a red velvet fur-trimmed cloak, wearing a jeweled tiara in her dark hair. She stands by a carved wooden staircase and column, looking to the right.Painting

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Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter

Margaret Sarah Carpenter · 1836

Document

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Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage

Luigi Federico Menabrea · 1842

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