Surely no single artistic depiction of Emperor Norton has been reproduced more times, over a longer period, than the cameo “cut” of the Emperor that featured on the fronts of his various scrip between January 1871 and January 1880.
Although inked copies of the depiction appeared on some 3,000 of the Emperor's promissory notes over the course of 9 years, precious little can be said for certain about the original engraving — including who carved it.
In this exploration, we dig into various particulars of the two note printers of record — Cuddy & Hughes and Charles A. Murdock & Co. — and connect some dots that point to likely scenarios for (a) why and when the engraving was created; (b) what the model for the engraving was; and (c) how it was "stewarded" for 9 years.
Included here: A rarely seen — and very large — image of the earliest-extant Norton note from November 1870, including the Emperor's mostly-intact red wax seal.
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In Victorian-era Britain and the United States, the mourning of a loved one or public figure was guided by an elaborate set of rituals and customs.
Among these: A man in mourning wore a black armband on his upper left arm. This could be a properly sewn and hemmed item — whether “homemade” or professionally manufactured — or, more simply, a hand-tied strip of black crape.
Often on this date — the anniversary of Emperor Norton’s death on 8 January 1880 — we at The Emperor Norton Trust have highlighted a particular late-1870s photograph of the Emperor, in profile, as the photo carries a certain funereal aspect.
Innumerable times over the last 12½ years, we have looked at this and another photograph of Emperor Norton from the same sitting without noticing that the Emperor is wearing a black mourning band in both photos.
As we don’t find this photographic detail documented anywhere, it stands to reason that no one else has noticed it either.
A little digging reveals who, most likely, the Emperor was mourning.
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Even at the most storied research libraries and historical societies, the catalog records for artifacts like early photographs — including basic details like the date and the photographer — can be notoriously unreliable.
Often, these records were created decades, even a century or more, ago — long before the advent of library science as a professional research discipline — and have not been reassessed or updated since then. Digitized, perhaps, but basically fossilized and forgotten. What this means for researchers is that catalog info can be little more than a starting point.
For the last decade, The Emperor Norton Trust has used 1864 as the date for two photographs of the Emperor that appear to have been taken during the same sitting. The date was from the catalog record of a major research institution — and, based on a variety of contextual factors, it was the only credible citation we were able to find.
Recently, we noted that the institution has removed this citation. This, together with our discovery of a new piece of evidence potentially relating to the photographs, prompted us to take a second look at the date question.
As a result of our investigation, we have revised our date for these photos.
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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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In three late-in-life studio portrait photographs — taken c.1878 by two different studios — Emperor Norton can be seen wearing a mysterious ring.
Were the rings shown in these photographs one and the same? Or were they different?
Was one, or both, a gift? If so: Did one, or both, of the rings feature an Emperor Norton insignia or inscription of some kind?
Was one a Masonic ring — a symbol the Emperor’s membership in Occidental Lodge No. 22 of Free and Accepted Masons?
Was the Emperor buried with one of these rings?
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In the mid to late 1870s, the Bradley & Rulofson studio created one of the seven photo-portraits of Emperor Norton the studio is known to have taken of the Emperor during his reign. The seated Emperor is holding his favorite walking stick, and his Chinese umbrella is propped against the chair.
The best-known version of this photograph appeared in a book published in 1964. The photo appears very dark — which adds to the mood but also obscures many details.
Here, we present a rarely seen brighter, more balanced — and more revealing — version of the photo that appeared in 1961.
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An extremely rare signed c.1864 Emperor Norton carte de visite is being auctioned right now via Bonhams.
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Emperor Norton was a favorite subject of a number of celebrity portrait photography studios that came to prominence in San Francisco during his reign. The Emperor is most closely associated with the studio of Bradley & Rulofson; and he was included in the studio's Celebrity Catalogue, which clients used to order prints of photographs produced by the studio. The Catalogue was a kind of index of the social stratification of the day — and offers a window into the Emperor's place in the social structure.
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For all the hundreds of times that we've done a Google image search on "Emperor Norton" here at The Emperor's Bridge Campaign, the Internet still has gifts and surprises for us. Yesterday, it was the following image of a "cabinet card" of the Emperor dated c.1878 and credited to the studio of Bradley & Rulofson, which took many of the most famous photographs of Emperor Norton. We'd never seen this one.
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