Two Houseworth Postscripts
A Much Better — If Still Flawed — Copy of a Rarely Seen Photograph of Emperor Norton
An Updated Date for Another
IN AUGUST 2015, I spied an obscurity on composer Gino Robair's MySpace page for his experimental opera I, Norton.
It was a photograph of Emperor Norton that I'd never seen but that I quickly recognized as being from the same sitting as the following different photo of the Emperor — rarely seen at the time; more familiar now — taken c.1874 by the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co.
Emperor Norton, c.1874, by Thomas Houseworth & Co. studio, 9 & 12 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Cabinet card, 5¾” x 3 ⅞”, source unknown. Image © 2016 Bonhams & Butterfields Auctioneers Corp.
The photo on Robair's long-since-archived page was tiny; obviously cropped from something larger; a little dark (like something from an old movie still); and tinted an odd shade of purple that suggested latter-day tinkering. Here it is in all its 143-by-206-pixels glory:
Image found, August 2015, on composer Gino Robair’s MySpace page for his opera I, Norton. Source: MySpace.com/inorton as archived 9 November 2012; click “More” in the Photo section
Robair couldn't recall where he got the image — probably from an early-vintage website, given the size. But, the photo didn't show up elsewhere online — including at Calisphere. And, neither the photo nor an original source photo was in any of the "usual" institutional collections — California Historical Society; California State Library; Bancroft Library; San Francisco Public Library.
My search dead-ended with my conclusion that the photograph probably was in private hands. But, I went ahead and added the "Robair" image to the gallery of photographs of the Emperor here on The Emperor Norton Trust’s website, as this was the only example of this photo of which I was aware.
And I included the image, for reference, in my August 2015 article “The Houseworth Photographs.”
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Fast forward to last June. The Society of California Pioneers posted to its Facebook page a photograph of an under-Plexi museum display of its own cabinet-card copy of the elusive photograph.
The Pioneers copy had a nasty tear obscuring a small portion of the Emperor's uniform. But, unlike the Robair example, it showed the Houseworth watermark and was mounted on Houseworth-branded cabinet card stock — confirming my original intuition that this was the second of two extant photos taken by the Houseworth studio during the same sitting. This was an historical "get."
An X factor in my search had been the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young; Legion of Honor).
For generations, the institutions comprising FAMSF maintained a small collection of Norton-related photographs, artworks, cartoons, and ephemera. In recent years, FAMSF has deaccessioned most of these. But, over the past year, the Search function on the FAMSF website continued to return listings for photographs of the Emperor — leaving open the possibility that FAMSF might have a "cleaner" example of the photograph in question.
Finally, last month, I was able to correspond with FAMSF's Assistant Curator of Photography, Sally Martin Katz, who confirmed that the information on the FAMSF site was outdated — and that FAMSF no longer has any photographs of Emperor Norton in its collection.
With that, I secured the following hi-res image of the Pioneers copy and have replaced the Robair example in the Trust's gallery here.
Emperor Norton, c.1874, by Thomas Houseworth & Co. studio, 9 & 12 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Cabinet card. Courtesy of the Society of California Pioneers (Object ID C026755).
The Pioneers copy is not perfect. But it is an original Houseworth studio artifact, and — in a side-by-side comparison — the connection to the other Houseworth portrait from this sitting is unmistakable.
The one advantage of the Robair example: It has no tear.
Presumably, the original is out there somewhere!
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THE SECOND postscript relates to dating.
One reason a date of c.1874 makes sense for the two photographs above is the address printed on both cabinet cards: "9 & 12 Montgomery St., San Francisco."
San Francisco directory listings and newspaper ads show that, in 1872, Thomas Houseworth & Co. moved from 317/319 Montgomery Street to new digs at 9 Montgomery — in the Lick House. Here, Houseworth ran a diversified enterprise, where he sold eyeglasses and optical equipment; exhibited and sold photographs (his own work and the work of many others); and had a hustle as a kind of travel agent.
The following year, in 1873, Houseworth added a new, larger location across the street, at 12 Montgomery.
By 1875, Houseworth was facing bankruptcy — and sometime in 1876 he vacated the 9 Montgomery location and leaned in to the celebrity / society portraiture business he was building at 12.
So, Houseworth's cabinet cards would have listed him at both 9 and 12 Montgomery for only about three years, between 1873 and 1876 — one factor in the c.1874 date of the two photographs above.
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Here is a later Thomas Houseworth & Co. photograph of the Emperor.
Emperor Norton, c.1877, by Thomas Houseworth & Co. studio, 12 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Cabinet card. California Historical Society Collection at Stanford.
The image quality is terrible — apologies! I snapped it quickly at the California Historical Society library several years ago using a phone with a substandard camera.
But, the image is clear enough to show that the cabinet card mounting lists only one location: "12 Montgomery St."
Here are the San Francisco directory listings for Thomas Houseworth & Co. in 1876 and 1877, showing that 1877 is the first year that San Francisco directories list Thomas Houseworth & Co. only at 12 Montgomery.
Previously, we have listed this later photo as "mid to late 1870s."
But, the studio address information — together with the fact that photographs dated 1878 and 1879 show the Emperor looking less "fleshy" and more grizzled and gray-haired, i.e., older — would seem to warrant a more specific date for this photo.
In the Trust’s photo gallery here, I've revised the date of this photo to "c.1877."
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