Images of Emerson
Numerous drawings, engravings, and photographs exist of Emerson, following his development from a young man to old age. Few are dated. The first person to address the question of Emerson’s images was F. B. Sanborn in “The Portraits of Emerson,” New England Magazine, 15 (December 1896): 449-468. Ralph H. Orth then took up this iconography project and produced a draft of a work on the subject, which he turned over to Joel Myerson in the mid-1990s. The current listing is kept up by Myerson. Unless otherwise indicated, the locations for pictures are the Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. For additional information, see Leslie Perrin Wilson, “‘The Is More Than the House’: Selected Emerson Portraits in the Concord Free Public Library,” Nineteenth-Century Prose, 33 (Spring 2006): 73-116.
While not exactly an image of Emerson, the "transparent eyeball," based on Christopher Pearse Cranch’s caricature of a passage from Nature, is famously associated with him. The “eyeball” is also a trademark of the avant-garde music group, The Residents, who wear eyeball masks when performing.
The comic The Existential Slapstick of Waldo and Emerson by J. Siergey has nothing to do with Emerson.
Perhaps the most famous other Ralph
Waldo Emerson who keeps appearing on the web and in auctions was an organist
and staff member at WLS radio in Chicago, and who wrote such works as “At
the End of the Sunset Trail” and “Land of Lullaby Dreams.”
