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

The Crockers returned to Sacramento from Europe in May 1871, in time to witness the groundbreaking for an addition to the house they had bought at the corner of Third and O Streets in 1868. Described as "one of the largest buildings in the city" the house was to include picture galleries, a library, a ballroom, and a "museum" for the display of scientific specimens, as well as a billiards room, a bowling alley, and a skating rink. Embellished with laurel wainscoting set into black walnut, "some 500 yards of Minton tile imported from Stoke-on-Trent," and trompe-l'oeil decorative painting, the magnificent building was capped by "two carloads of slate roofing." [12]

In 1871 the San Francisco Art Association was founded. Some five hundred people attended its initial reception, and by September it boasted three hundred members. [13] The following month the paintings acquired by the Crockers in Europe were shown at Snow and Roos Art Gallery in San Francisco to mixed critical response. [14] In an art market buoyed by patrons flush with profits from the Comstock Lode and the railroad, Crocker soon became one of the most high-profile collectors of contemporary northern California painting. In May 1872 he purchased Thomas Hill's masterpiece, Great Canyon of the Sian-a, Yosemite (P1. VIII) of 1871, reportedly for ten thousand dollars. [15] Painted in Boston following the artist's May 1867 return from France, the painting was the second of two large (six by ten feet) canvases Hill created offering expansive views of Yosemite's best-known landmarks from the overlook near Old Inspiration Point. Most likely relying on photographs by his colleague Carleton E. Watkins (1829- 1916), w hich Hill would have seen at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 and which he may have possessed, both compositions were acclaimed for their accurate depictions of the awesome landscape. Confident of the skills he had acquired abroad, Hill asked ten thousand dollars for the first painting when he exhibited it in Boston in 1868, but probably found his buyer--Crocker's brother Charles--only when it was shown in California fourteen months later. [16]

The experience was apparently repeated with Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite, which was described by the Boston Evening Transcript on November 18, 1871, as "a success and the grandest one Mr. Hill has achieved." This praise paled when the painting was later shown at the Palette Club in New York City and the critic for Watson's Art Journal declared:

If it be true that Art, like Christianity and Civilization, has for its mission to bring us back to Nature and so to God,--then indeed is Thomas Hill...the apostle of Truth, in whose capacious brain the majestia forms and subtle effects of Nature have come to rest; and in the "Canyon of the Sierras" he has given us the incarnation of his ideas, with all the power freshness and grandeur of nature. [17]

Nonetheless, Hill failed to secure a purchaser in the East for Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite, and the arrangements for its installation at the Snow and Roos gallery, rather than the ill health he cited, may have been the impetus for his return to California in May l872. [18] There the painting again earned accolades, with one reviewer asserting it was "the grandest picture ever exhibited in this State." [19] In adding it to his collection, E. B. Crocker not only acquired one of the artist's most impressive Yosemite views, but a stellar example of the impact Hill's recent stay in Eumpe had on his style. In contrast to Sugar Loaf Peak, El Dora do County, the foreground is developed with relatively loose, thick paint strokes, which activate the surface and provide a foil to thinner pigment in the sky, clouds, and distant mountains. As opposed to the rosy tones in the sky of the earlier painting, Hill shows the scene in even daylight, a characteristic of his later landscapes. His use of photographic and B arbizon school techniques now allowed Hill to unify California's majestic features in his compositions, both large and small.