The Emperor Norton Cartoon That Got the Jump on Jump

March 28, 2024 / John Lumea

Ask any careful student of the Emperor Norton story to name the most famous early cartoonist of the Emperor and they are likely to single out Edward Jump (1832–1883). They would be right about that.

They might go on to credit Jump as the first artist to depict Emperor Norton with the dogs Bummer and Lazarus. About this they would be wrong.

It's true that, in the early 1860s, Jump created three cartoons that featured the Emperor and the dogs in the same scene — and that these cartoons have been influential in associating the Emp with Bummer and Lazarus in the popular imagination.

But, Jump was not the first artist to make this connection.

That distinction goes to someone who was not even a cartoonist by profession — but whose lithographed and published cartoon, apparently sold as a standalone sheet, showing Bummer and Lazarus sitting near Emperor Norton predates by as much as a year or more Jump's earliest cartoon showing these characters together.

This is the story of the artist and the cartoon that appear to be Edward Jump's conceptual influencer.

That we are aware, this is the first time the story has been told.

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categories / Research, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, artist, comic, cartoon, caricature, R.M. Evans, Edward Jump, Benjamin Franklin Butler, Benjamin F. Butler, B.F. Butler, Tompson in a Quandary, lithograph, lithographer, Bummer & Lazarus, George Washington II, Frederick Coombs, James Tompson, 1861, 1862, 1863

Emperor Norton Was a San Francisco Fixture Within 3 Years of Declaring His Reign

January 16, 2024 / John Lumea

From the time that Joshua Norton publicly declared and signed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in his Proclamation published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin of 17 September 1859, there was a more or less steady pulse of newspaper publications of his subsequent Proclamations — as well as newspaper reports of activities and sightings of the new Emperor.

But, at what point was there evidence of a separate public consciousness that this “Emperor Norton” might be a new character that was here to stay — a public awareness of the Emperor’s early ubiquity and fame?

When did Emperor Norton start to go meta?

Here, we document the earliest signs of local awareness that a new player had arrived on the urban stage.

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categories / Research, ARENA, Original sources
tags / fame, reputation, newspaper, report, editorial, humor, Art, cartoon, sketch, lithograph, T. Grob, Edward Jump, 1859, 1861, 1862, 1863

Emperor Norton Does Art Criticism With a Borrowed Jackknife — And the Crowd Loves It

December 28, 2023 / John Lumea

By 1861 — and for the 18-plus-year remainder of his reign — Emperor Norton was a favorite and enduring subject for San Francisco cartoonists and theater troupes, who found that local audiences enjoyed the good-natured lampooning of their Emperor.

The Emperor himself was less amused — and, there are a couple of oft-cited examples of the Emperor’s expressing his royal displeasure over how he was portrayed in these contexts.

Recently, we uncovered an “episode of displeasure” that is even better documented than the familiar examples.

The occasion was the mounting of an advertisement using Emperor Norton’s image on a construction fence at Montgomery and California Streets. The Emperor borrowed a jackknife; cut out the image of himself; and sliced the image to shreds.

The crowd, as they say, “went wild.”

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, cartoon, comic, caricature, photograph, theater, depiction, portrayal, Safe Deposit Building, Montgomery Street, California Street, advertisement, ad, George Frederick Keller, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Jump, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Reese, 1861, 1863, 1869, 1873, 1874, 1875

The Pantheonic Statuette of Norton I

May 30, 2023 / John Lumea

It’s well known that souvenir photographs and lithographs of Emperor Norton were sold in San Francisco shops during the Emperor’s lifetime.

Norton biographer William Drury takes it considerably further to claim that, by the early 1870s, there was a whole cottage industry of “Emperor Norton statuettes, Emperor Norton dolls, Emperor Norton mugs and jugs, Emperor Norton Imperial Cigars” — and even that there were peddlers hawking Emperor Norton merch at his funeral.

I find no evidence to support much of what Drury asserts — but…

In 1877 — a couple of years before Emperor Norton died in 1880 — a German immigrant jeweler and sculptor in San Francisco created a highly accomplished statuette of the Emperor that deserves a much closer look than it has received.

Although there is no ready evidence that this nearly-two-foot-tall statuette was sold in shops, there is evidence to suggest that it was a fixture in San Francisco saloons — and even that the Emperor himself had a copy in his apartment.

Among other things, I document here the three known copies of the statuette and offer a glimpse into the life and work of the sculptor.

There even are cameo appearances from historians of Ancient Rome and the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s a fascinating story, previously untold.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Tributes, ARENA
tags / Art, sculpture, statue, statuette, figurine, Herman J. Brand, Jonas Brand, jeweler, sculptor, plaster, medallion, token, charm, gold, saloon, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Society of California Pioneers, Wells Fargo History Museum, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Allen Stanley Lane, William Drury, photograph, cabinet card, painting, lithograph, terra cotta, Pantheon, pantheonic, Rome, Oxford English Dictionary, 1862, 1865, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1872, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1883, 1906, 1921, 1930, 1935, 1939, 1986, 2021

Emperor Norton as an Artist’s Model

April 26, 2023 / John Lumea

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.

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categories / Research, Tributes, Original sources
tags / Art, portrait, painting, sitting, Addie Ballou, Oscar Kunath, Virgil Williams, Alice Brown Chittenden, San Francisco Call, Ward Ritchie Press, San Francisco Art Association, California School of Design, Mechanics' Fair, Mechanics' Pavilion, Bradley & Rulofson, Society of California Pioneers, 1873, 1874, 1877, 1878, 1879

Life and Death of an Emperor Norton Mural (Bottle Caps Edition)

July 08, 2020 / John Lumea

A fondly regarded public artwork — a mural-sized rendering of Emperor Norton in bottle caps — came on the scene in The Mission, San Francisco, in late 2011.

It left quietly a few months ago.

Photographs and Google street views from 2009 to the present document the rise, fade and fall.

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categories / Places, Tributes, Legacy, ARENA
tags / Art, public art, mural, bottle caps, Scott Bowers, Mission, Bryant Street

David Belasco: An Early "Emperor Norton" of the San Francisco Stage

March 26, 2017 / John Lumea

The legendary theatrical producer, impresario, director and playwright David Belasco (1853–1931) made his name in New York City. But he cut his teeth on the San Francisco stage — initially as an actor. And, in the 1873 San Francisco performance that brought him his first critical notice, Belasco's character was a thinly veiled Emperor Norton. The Emperor, now in the 14th year of his reign, was very much alive and well in San Francisco.

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categories / Original sources, Research
tags / Art, Theater, David Belasco, The Gold Demon, 1870s, Metropolitan Theater, Misha Berson

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