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

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Janice Driesbach

The artist who most attracted the Crockers in the 1860s was the European-horn and trained Nahl. Descended from a family of artists from Kassel, Germany Nahl studied there and in Dresden and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1849 with his mother and siblings. After some successes in New York City he and his entourage arrived in California by way of Panama in May 1851, seeking their fortune in the goldfields. By the year's close, dissuaded by the rigors of mining, they had settled in Sacramento, where Nahl and August Wenderoth (1819-1884), a family friend, set up a studio. After a disastrous fire in November 1852 destroyed their house and belongings, the group moved to San Francisco, but Nahl continued to accept commissions from Sacramento patrons in succeeding years. [7]

During the 1860s the Crockers purchased or commissioned at least five large canvases by Nahl, all of which could be classified as fanciful history paintings. [8] The Love Chase (Pl. III), for instance, ostensibly portrays an Arabian courting custom by which the daughter of a sheik slows her steed to glance suggestively at a prospective suitor while her family looks on. [9] Painted in a high-key palette, the composition is contrived even for Nahl and, like all the paintings he completed for the Crockers at this time, may have been intended to fulfill the expectations of an American patron for grand European painting.

A number of California artists did, in fact, go to Europe to study after the Civil War, among them Butman, Hill, and Virgil Williams (1820-1886). The Crockers, too, set off for Europe in August 1869, a mere three months after E. B. Crocker had suffered a stroke. Over the course of twenty-two months they acquired more than six hundred paintings and more than twelve hundred old master drawings. Among their purchases was probably their first acquisition of a work by the Scottish-born William Keith, who himself had left San Francisco for Europe in 1869. According to one of Keith's biographers, Crocker and the artist met in Dresden, and the transitional Landscape of 1870 (Pl. VII) was exhibited there that year. [10] Keith's earlier works, such as Mount Baker, Washington, painted in 1869 (Pl. V), reflect his training as a wood engraver in its tightly rendered forms and the figures, trees, and sky which appear to be independently conceived. By the time he painted Landscape, his European study had paid off, for not only did he integrate these separate elements into this scene along the Rhine, but he had also clearly gained greater sophistication in rendering atmospheric effects.

With Mount Tamalpais, California (Pl. VI), painted about 1871, Keith reached maturity as an artist. Perhaps commissioned by Crocker while he was abroad, [11] the canvas features the most distinctive topographic feature in Marin County, Mount Tamalpais, a popular recreation destination for San Francisco residents and a motif Keith painted often. The figures at the right are perhaps engaged in hunting, for abundant game attracted many hunters to the region. The cattle herder at the left may acknowledge the fact that at the time Main County was a center of California's dairy industry. Keith routinely came to use the white tones of cattle and sheep to establish a focal point in his pastoral compositions. By using the muted colors of late afternoon he displays the evocative effects that earned him the sobriquet "California's Poet-Painter"