In 1879, an 18-year-old Charles Andrew Gunnison (1861–1897) took a trek across the United States from his home in San Francisco, visiting several cities on the Eastern seaboard and venturing up to Montreal and Quebec City before returning to San Francisco via Panama and Central America.
Gunnison brought with him an autograph book that he converted into a sketchbook to help him record what he saw.
One of the last sketches in the book — done as Gunnison arrived back home at the end of his trip — is of Emperor Norton.
Apparently drawn in December 1879, a month before the Emperor’s death in January 1880, this is one of the last (and possibly the last) extant artistic rendering of Emperor Norton — painting, sketch, or otherwise — done during the Emperor’s lifetime.
A separate sketch on the same page and another sketch on the previous page provide clues that reflect the anti-Chinese mood of San Francisco —and possibly also of the artist — in 1879. Given the Emperor's own long-standing defense of the Chinese, the juxtaposed sketches make for a telling — if unintended — commentary.
Charles Gunnison died only 18 years later. One hopes that, if — in 1879 — a late-teen Gunnison did share in the prevailing anti–Chinese attitudes of 1879 San Francisco, he was able to wrest free of those attitudes before the city did.
Read More
Emperor Norton and the fear-mongering, violence-inciting demagogue Denis Kearney were on opposite sides of California’s “Chinese question.” But, in December 1879, the two men were depicted together on the back cover of The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, in a cartoon by George Frederick Keller.
The cartoon spoke volumes about the Emperor’s moral stature.
Read More
A wonderful illustration of Emperor Norton featured by the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper in 1913 and the California Review monthly in 1904 got its start as part of a triptych of “Prominent Men of San Francisco” drawn by George Frederick Keller (1846–1927) in c.1874, as the Emperor was reaching the height of his imperial influence and becoming a nationally known figure.
Not long after this, in 1876, Keller came to prominence as the chief artist of the new San Francisco Wasp, a position that briefly would earn him both fame and notoriety as one of the leading political cartoonists of his day.
The full story is in the flip — including high-resolution wonders that The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign is pleased to present online for the first time.
Read More
For Emperor Norton Day 2017, a look at how — in both art and prose — the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp paid tribute to the Emperor on 17 January 1880, nine days after his death.
Read More
On the eve of the 137th anniversary of Emperor Norton's death in 1880 comes a poignant artistic discovery from the pages of a celebrated magazine founded in the last years of his life.
Read More