TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
It appears that the earliest known photograph of Emperor Norton is a little earlier than we thought — and earlier than anyone else has said.
The case for the time frame that we focus on here draws on early artistic depictions of the Emperor and on one of the Emperor’s earliest sartorial choices, which is documented in an easy-to-miss newspaper item from May 1860.
Read MorePhotographs of Emperor Norton show that, just as the Emperor had a favorite walking stick, he also had a favorite hat pin — in the shape of a spread-winged bird.
Artists in the Emperor’s day painted and drew him wearing this pin.
It’s not surprising that contemporary San Francisco artists have rendered the bird as a phoenix.
Alas — spoiler alert! — it turns out that Emperor Norton did not wear a phoenix in his hat; the Emperor’s bird was a military American eagle.
But, this particular eagle does trace its heraldic roots to a phoenix — albeit it not a San Francisco one.
The fascinating story of how the phoenix of Scottish heraldry was transformed into the eagle of U.S. government iconography traces through the righteous Scottish cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Continental Army coat buttons of George Washington and the design of the Great Seal of the United States.
One could say that Emperor Norton was wearing an eagle and a phoenix all at once: appropriate for an Emperor of the United States whose Seat was in the cool, grey city of love.
Pull up a chair!
Read MoreThe Emperor Norton mural in The Pied Piper, at the Palace Hotel, in San Francisco — painted by the city’s longtime “artist laureate,” Antonio Sotomayor (1904–1985) — is one of the best-known and -loved Emperor-themed works of art.
A newly discovered art-historical survey done for the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1953 offers an elusive date for the painting — and a new way of seeing it.
Includes rarely seen photographs.
Read MoreRichard D. Faulkner — of Bodega, in Sonoma County, Calif. — was an 1877 graduate of Illinois Industrial University, now known as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While at the university, Faulkner was the business manager of the student newspaper, The Illini.
In its March 1880 number — two months after the death of Emperor Norton — The Illini published Faulkner’s literary profile-in-tribute to the Emperor, including Faulkner's memories of having met the Emperor several times on an earlier trip to San Francisco.
The profile was accompanied by a lovely new woodcut illustration of the Emp.
Read MoreA 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 MoreOn 9 November 1879 — just two months before Emperor Norton's death — the San Francisco Chronicle published a Sunday front-page profile of the Emperor that was based on rare interview with the Emperor himself.
The profile was accompanied by a lovely drawing of the Emperor that was reproduced 60 years later for Allen Stanley Lane's 1939 biography, Emperor Norton: The Mad Monarch of America — but that has languished since then.
The Emperor's Bridge Campaign has had a new photographic print made of the drawing and has added a hi-res scan of it to ARENA, our digital ARchive of Emperor Norton in Art.
Learn more and see the drawing, after the flip.
Read MoreFor 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 MoreOn 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 MoreIn 1926, San Francisco-born artist Charles William Saalburg penned an article for The New York Times, in which he recalled many of the storied figures that peopled the San Francisco of his younger years. The piece featured Saalburg's own illustrations of these characters, including an undated rendering of Emperor Norton, which he depicted — perhaps from childhood memory — as a Santa Claus figure with an admiral's hat.
Saalburg's illustration of the Emperor is included in the Paintings gallery of ARENA, the Campaign's digital Archive of Emperor Norton in Art, Music & Film.
Read MoreAt a special event on Thursday 13 October, titled My Emperor, My Muse, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign will bring together an eclectic and interesting mix of people — artists who've created specific Emperor-themed works and others who have thought deeply about Emperor Norton — for a conversation about the Emperor's abiding cultural import as an avatar of whimsy, openness, tolerance and fair play.
We'll learn why Emperor Norton moves these people; how he has shaped their projects; why they think the Emperor remains a cultural touchstone; and the role that they think art can play in shaping and polishing the stone.
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Comic, 1871, by John Steinberg. The comic appeared in a late 1871 issue of Frederick Marriott's California Mail Bag magazine, as part of a group of Steinberg's "Humorous Sketches of the War in Amador." Source: Internet Archive.
Today, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign launches ARENA: Archive of Emperor Norton in Art, Music & Film. ARENA seeks to be a comprehensive, authoritative, searchable digital archive of representations and interpretations of Emperor Norton in the visual arts, in music and in film — the mediums that are most readily presented online. The Archive includes "renderings" of Emperor Norton from the early 1860s to the present.
Read MoreWhile a student at the Savannah College of Art & Design (Atlanta campus), freelance cartoonist Rachel Ordway created a wonderful little 3-part morality tale in which Emperor Norton explains himself to a young kid.
Read MoreIn the mid 1880s, a Canadian illustrator and writer named Palmer Cox, then living in New York, started make a name for himself with a children's comic series that followed the exploits of fairy-like creatures called Brownies. But when Cox published his first book, in 1874, he was nearing the end of a 12-year stint in San Francisco. The book, a diary collection of Twain-like comic sketches, included Cox's endearing illustration of one of the city's most famous citizens.
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.
Read MoreOur friend, Katie Haverkamp, did her nails. Click for the fabulous reveal!
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