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A vision for the West: Judge crocker's art gallery and California paintings collection - Edwin Bryant Crocker

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Janice Driesbach

Described as the "single finest Italianate building in the West, if not in America,"[1] the original art gallery of the Crocker Art Museum (Pl. I) and its collections document the taste and ambitions of its founders, Judge Edwin Bryant Crocker (1818-1875) and his wife, Margaret (1822- 1901), and California as a major destination for artists in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. [2] Designed by Seth Babson, the sumptuous building houses the collection the Crockers assembled in Europe and California in the late 1860s and early l870s. Thanks to its location in Sacramento, headquarters of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, for which Crocker served as legal counsel, and far from the earthquake and fire that destroyed innumerable works of art in San Francisco in 1906, the museum is able to offer an outstanding collection of early California paintings in the building for which it was assembled. Indeed, three masterpieces--Thomas Hill's Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite (P1. VIII) and Charles Christia n Nahl's Sunday Morning in the Mines (P1. II) and Fandango (P1. XI) occupy the same prominent locations as they did when the gallery first opened to public view in the spring of 1874.

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E. B. Crocker was born in Jamestown, New York, in 1818 and studied civil engineering at the Rensselaer School (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy By 1836 he had settled in South Bend, Indiana, where he read law, was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-four, [3] and, in 1847, assumed the practice of his mentor there, Joseph Leonard Jernegan. Five years later, following the death of his first wife and the controversy stirred by his representation of runaway slaves, Crocker left Indiana. He traveled to New York City, where the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher presided over his marriage to Margaret Rhodes in July 1852, and then followed his younger brother Charles (1822-1888) to California, where gold had been discovered in 1848. At first he helped run Charles's store in Sacramento, but he soon became engaged in the newly founded State Agricultural Society and resumed his practice of law. By 1855 he was a prominent member of the emerging Republican Party, and in 1863 he served seven months as an assoc iate justice on the State Supreme Court. Soon after he joined Charles and the other members of the so-called Big Four (Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Potter Huntington) in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad east toward Promontory Point, Utah. [4]

In the ensuing five years, while E. B. Crocker and his growing family were establishing themselves in Sacramento, San Francisco was becoming a magnet for artists in search of gold. Like their fellow argonauts, many stayed only briefly while others found that, when prospecting proved insufficiently rewarding their skills were in demand as portraitists, genre painters, or for commercial commissions, such as engraving certificates and providing illustrations for articles and essays. Among the early arrivals were William Smith Jewett (1812-1873), Nahl, and Stephen william Shaw (1817-1900). By 1857 the First Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics' Institute afforded local artists an opportunity to exhibit their work in a public venue, and two years later the state agricultural fairs--which would have attracted Crocker's interest--offered art exhibitions as well. [5] Another outcome of the gold rush was a growing appreciation for the state's spectacular landscape vistas, with Thomas A. Ayres (c. 1816-1858) sketchi ng Yosemite as early as 1855. Such scenery lured west California's first landscape specialist, Frederick A. Butman (1820-1871), who arrived in 1859 and was followed by others, some perhaps motivated by Civil War hostilities in the East. [6]

New galleries and the growing artist population soon generated growing press attention. Hill's Sugar Loaf Peak, El Dorado County (Pl. IV), which may have been the first California painting Crocker purchased, was enthusiastically received when it was exhibited at the newly opened Art-Union gallery in San Francisco in the spring of 1865. The San Francisco Bulletin of March 23 declared it "the best and boldest of his landscapes, [which] evinces marked improvement, resulting from that earnest study and conscientious purpose which characterizes the true artist." The painting does demonstrate the English-horn Hill's advance as a landscape painter since his arrival in California from Boston in 1861, although its compositional structure and crisply delineated details are reminiscent of the Hudson River school paintings he knew from his residence back East. In this charming scene he employs devices developed in response to Hudson River school landscapes to render California's distinctive topography--here the impress ive rock formations of the western Sierra Nevada along the American River. The figures and shelter at the left acknowledge the persistence of American Indian communities in California despite the devastating impact of the gold rush. They also presage Hill's frequent use of Indians in his views of Yosemite.

A vision for the West: Judge crocker's art gallery and California paintings collection - Edwin Bryant Crocker

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Janice Driesbach

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