I found that I had to use .setAttribute('crossOrigin', '')
and had to append a timestamp to the URL's query string to avoid a 304 response lacking the Access-Control-Allow-Origin
header.
This gives me
var url = 'http://lorempixel.com/g/400/200/';
var imgObj = new Image();
imgObj.src = url + '?' + new Date().getTime();
imgObj.setAttribute('crossOrigin', '');