The Crocker Art Museum: Sacramento's Hidden Treasure

Sacramento does not advertise itself as an art city. But hidden near the old Victorian neighborhoods downtown is the Crocker Art Museum, which holds the distinction of being the oldest public art museum in the American West, a fact that surprises nearly everyone who hears it.

The collection began with Edwin Bryant Crocker, the brother of Charles Crocker, one of the Big Four railroad magnates who financed the Central Pacific. Edwin was the legal counsel for the Central Pacific and made a fortune, but his passion was art. In eighteen sixty-nine, the year the transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Edwin took his wife Margaret and their daughters to Europe on an extended tour. He bought more than seven hundred paintings, mostly Dutch, Flemish, and German works, along with thousands of drawings and prints.

When Edwin returned to Sacramento, he built a gallery wing onto his home specifically to house the collection. In eighteen eighty-five, ten years after Edwin's death, Margaret Crocker donated the house, the gallery, and the entire art collection to the city of Sacramento. It opened to the public that year, making it the first public art museum west of the Mississippi.

The collection has grown enormously since. A major expansion designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates opened in two thousand ten, adding over a hundred thousand square feet while preserving the original Victorian-era gallery with its intricate parquet floors and painted ceilings. Today the museum holds more than fifteen thousand works spanning four thousand years, from ancient ceramics to California Impressionism to contemporary photography.

Edwin Crocker built his gallery in a gold rush city at the end of the continent and filled it with European masterworks. It was an audacious act of cultural ambition, and Sacramento has been quietly proud of it ever since.