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Crocker Art Museum

© Judith Stock

The Crocker Family and their role in Sacramento society are well documented in the remarkable Crocker Art Museum, the longest continuously operating public art museum west of the Mississippi.

Edwin Crocker, lawyer and associate justice of the state Supreme Court in 1863 came from a prominent early California family. Brother Charles Crocker was one of the big four railroad barons of that era along with the likes of Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford. Not the only famous Crocker, his wife Margaret was a well-known philanthropist, who constantly added to her art collection and her extensive art library.

In 1873, the gallery building was completed next door to their Victorian mansion on 3rd Street in Sacramento. But it wasn't just an art gallery; the gallery building also contained a ballroom, billiard parlor, roller skating rink, bowling alley, and indoor swimming pool. In 1885 Margaret Crocker donated the gallery to the city of Sacramento. In 1901 the family home was donated to a rescue mission and later rescued by a Crocker daughter in 1911 and became an annex to the gallery. Floor tile from Stoke-on-Trent in England in the 1870s was relayed in the original pattern along with a number of other renovation projects that restored the buildings original architectural style.

Since the 1880s the museum's fine art holdings have grown to include an extraordinary collection of contemporary Northern California art and early California art from the Gold Rush period through the close of the 19th century by artists like William Keith, Thomas Hill, and William Hahn.

Fine examples of European and American photography (800 pieces) that include Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbot, Marion Post Wolcott and Roger Vail are among some of the works represented at the Crocker. The international collection of ceramics (1,800 works) includes pieces by Hans Coper, Otto and Gertrude Natzler, Lucie Rie, and Marguerite Wildenhain along with Japanese folk pottery work. Add to this the American art collection that includes Georgia O'Keeffe's striking still life "It Was a Man and a Pot" (1942) and Childe Hassam's "An Outdoor Portrait of Miss Weir" (1909) rounds out this most sophisticated collection of fine art housed in a fine Victorian mansion.

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