Addie Ballou is best known now — where she is known at all — as a women’s suffrage crusader, a rather bad poet, and a (probably overconfident) lecturer on any of the subjects she was game to talk about for an hour to any group who asked, provided they had a room and a podium.

But, Ballou also had a brief career as a minimally trained portrait artist.

A certain conventional wisdom holds that, in 1877, Emperor Norton sat for a portrait painted by Ballou — and that this is the only such portrait the Emperor ever sat for during his lifetime.

As ever with Emperor Norton, though, a look under the hood reveals that things probably are not quite as we’ve been led to believe.

Read on for some newly uncovered details about old art associations.