TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
In…
Directory listings showing one of his business interests;
A number of stories about him from his lifetime;
At least one Proclamation by him; and
At least one painting of him done during his life
…there are clues that Emperor Norton had an abiding fondness for cigars and for pipe smoking.
Here, we line up in one place all the evidentiary “dots” we’ve located so far.
Some rare finds here.
Read MoreAddie 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.
Read MoreOne of the most arresting and enigmatic images of Emperor Norton is an 1870s watercolor of him — in street clothes and smoking a pipe — that hung for more than 30 years in the library of the Bohemian Club, in San Francisco. No doubt known by the Emperor himself during his lifetime, this painting later made its way into the Overland Monthly — thanks, in part, to a member of Robert Louis Stevenson's extended family.
Here's the story of this wonderful portrait.
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