Crocker Art Museum: The Oldest West of the Mississippi

The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento occupies a Victorian mansion at Third and O Streets, and its origin is the story of a Gold Rush lawyer who went to Europe, bought everything he could carry, and then left it all to his city.

Edwin Bryant Crocker was a Sacramento attorney and the brother of Charles Crocker, one of the Central Pacific Railroad's founding partners. From eighteen sixty-nine to eighteen seventy-one, Edwin and his wife Margaret traveled through Europe collecting art on a scale that astonished even wealthy Californians. They returned with seven hundred and one paintings and one thousand three hundred and forty-four master drawings, the largest private art collection in the United States at the time. Edwin converted the family property on O Street into a purpose-built gallery addition, and the couple opened it informally to visitors while they were alive.

Edwin Crocker died in eighteen seventy-five. Margaret lived for another decade, and in eighteen eighty-five she deeded the entire property, the historic house, the gallery wing, and the full collection, to the City of Sacramento and the California Museum Association. It became the first public art museum west of the Mississippi River.

The collection's strengths reflect the tastes of well-traveled Victorians: Dutch and Flemish masters, German Romantic landscapes, Italian Renaissance works, and a substantial archive of drawings that remains significant to scholars today. Over the following century the museum grew slowly, adding California and American art to its European core.

The transformation of the institution came in two thousand ten, with the opening of the Teel Family Pavilion, a modern expansion that more than tripled the museum's floor space and allowed it to display work that had sat in storage for generations. The original Crocker mansion and gallery wing remain intact, a rare survival of Sacramento's Gilded Age building stock in a city that lost much of its Victorian core to midcentury urban renewal. Edwin and Margaret chose wisely. Their collection has been free to Sacramento for over a hundred and forty years.