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

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Janice Driesbach

Judge Crocker's purchases were, of course, restricted in time and to the relatively few artists active in California in the 1870s. Among the well-known talents who did not attract his patronage was Albert Bierstadt, whose small in the Yosemite Valley (P1. XV), purchased in 1978, might have been inspired during his six-week visit in 1863 or on his return to California the following decade. Crossing the Isthmus (Pl. XVIII), painted by the late Hudson River school artist Albertus Del Orient Browere on his second extended visit to California, in 1858, represents a near contemporary (albeit romanticized) view of goldminers trekking through the popular Panama passage. Denny's "City of Lakeport" on Clear Lake (P1. XVII), completed soon after Judge Crocker's death, offers a striking contrast to Towing the "Old Veteran" in its quiet, more intimate view and inland location. Depicting California's largest natural lake following a storm--as evidenced by the capsized boat at the right and receding clouds at the upper left --this charming painting acknowledges the importance of the shipping industry which provided vital services to farmers who settled the region in the 1860s. The recent gift of a landscape view by the popular Mexican-born painter Fortunato Arriola (P1. XIX) is an excellent example of the romantic moonlit scenes he created from memory in his San Francisco studio in the 1860s. Additions such as these allow the collection to offer ongoing edification and enjoyment, much as the Crockers envisioned when they established one of the first public museum collections in the West.

JANICE DRIESBACH, formely the curator of art at the Crocker Art Museum, is currently the director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in Lincoln.

(1.) Joseph A. Baird Jr., "Judge Cracker's 'Art Gallery." Cracker Art Museum: Handbook of Paintings, ad. Richard Vincent West (Cracker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 1979), p. 15.

(2.) Ibid.

(3.) K.D. Kuntz, Sacramento's Pioneer Patrons of Art: The Edwin Bryant Crocker Family, rev. ad. (Sacramento County Historical Society Sacramento, California, 19%), pp. 1-2. This publication is the authoritative source for biographical information on E. B. Cracker and his family.

(4.) Ibid., pp. 2-9. Although E. B. Cracker had large holdings in the Central Pacific Railroad Company by the 1870s, his investment was modest in comparison with those of the Big Four:

(5.) Janice T. Driesbach, Harvey L. Jones, and Katherine Church Holland, Art of the Gold Rush (Oakland Museum of California, Cracker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, and University of California Press, Berkeley 1998), p.5; and Kurutz, Sacramento's Pioneer Patrons of Art, n. 48.

(6.) The arrival of a number of artists in California, among them Thomas Hill, Samuel Marsden Brookes, and Virgil Williams, during 1861 and 1862, may have been stimulated by the political situation in the East. See Janice T. Driesbach, Direct from Nature: The Oil Sketches of Thomas Hill (Yosemite Association in association with the Cracker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 1997), pp. 14-15.