The Crockers and their Collection

The youngest of twelve children, Margaret Crocker was born Margaret Eleanor Rhodes on February 25, 1822, in Ohio. Her father died shortly before her birth. When her mother also passed away, Margaret went to live with a married sister, Anne Bender, in South Bend, Indiana. There, she sang in a local choir, which is where she met Edwin and Mary Crocker. When Mary fell ill, Margaret tended to her. Following Mary’s death, Margaret accepted Edwin’s proposal of marriage. They soon left for San Francisco and made their way to Sacramento, where Edwin’s brother Charles had a dry-goods store and was quickly becoming one of the wealthiest men in town.  

Margaret was instrumental in helping build the family’s art collection on their two-year grand tour of Europe. After Edwin’s passing, Margaret continued to operate the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery and pursued other philanthropic endeavors for the Sacramento community. She opened a conservatory devoted to plant research in 1881, which was located across from city cemetery and provided flowers to those who could not otherwise afford to place them on the graves of family members. Margaret also opened the Marguerite Home in 1884 to provide comfort to aged women at a time when there was no comparable support from the government.   

Margaret was also responsible for making the Crocker collection public. After presenting the “Crocker Art Gallery” and the bulk of its collections to the City of Sacramento and the newly formed California Museum Association (now the Crocker Art Museum Association) in May 1885, she maintained residences in Sacramento, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, and New York. She died on December 1, 1901, in New York. Her ashes were returned to Sacramento and placed in the family plot at the City Cemetery.

E. B. and Margaret Crocker had five children together, three of whom died young. Their first child was Kate Eugene Crocker, born in 1854. Kate had an interest in art and studied under Charles Christian Nahl. She married James O. B. Gunn in 1874 and died less than a year later in childbirth. Their second child, Edwin Clark, was born in 1856, however he died shortly after birth. Nellie Margaret was born in 1857 and passed from Bright’s disease in 1879. 

The Crockers’ fourth child was Jennie Louise, who was born in 1860. Jennie married attorney and businessman Jacob Sloat Fassett in February 1879 and moved to Elmira, New York. Fassett was a state senator in New York and U.S. Congressman. With Jennie, he had many investments, including banking, lumber, and gold mines in Korea. In 1911, Jennie Crocker Fassett contributed $10,000 to help the City of Sacramento purchase the family’s mansion (formerly a rescue mission) for use as offices and exhibition space. In 1912, she and her husband moved to Korea. Welcomed at the Imperial court, they became especially interested in Asian art, collecting ceramics, jade, and ivory. Jennie’s gifts to the Gallery in the late 1920s seeded the current collections of Asian art and international ceramics. She continued her relationship with the Gallery until her death in 1937. 

Amy Isabella (later Aimée), born in 1863, was the youngest of the Crocker children. Throughout her years, Aimée received widespread press for numerous aspects of her personal life ranging from her travels to the far east, her pet bulldogs and python, her five marriages, to her tattoos. Newspapers devised many monikers for her such as: Queen of the Pearls, the Python Princess, the Tattooed Countess, Woman of a Thousand Fads and Fancies, and the Queen Regent of a Gilded Bohemia. Aimée was married five times, two of which were to Russian nobility. Once criticized for her rebellious nature, today, she is celebrated. Aimée passed away in 1941 while living in New York City. 

Prior to the Crockers’ trip to Europe, E. B. Crocker was already purchasing paintings. He had begun collecting important works by artists including Thomas Hill and Charles Christian Nahl. The last painting E. B. purchased before heading to Europe was Nahl’s Evening on the Sacramento River. 

While most of the paintings in the original collection came from the Crockers’ time in Dresden, it’s likely the Crockers also went to western Germany and possibly both Italy and France. The Crockers purchased many genre paintings that depicted daily life as well as copies of masterworks. According to the sparse records that remain from their time in Europe, it looks like the Crockers purchased paintings at a rate of roughly one per day. 

Upon the Crockers’ return to Sacramento, many of the paintings remained in San Francisco to be framed at Snow & Roos frame shop and gallery, where some were displayed for the public while the Crockers awaited the completion of their own gallery. Installation of the collection at the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery began at the end of 1873 and the Crockers continued to purchase additional paintings by California artists, including examples on display in the permanent collection galleries.

The finest early collection of master drawings in the United States and the oldest in the West, the Crocker Art Museum's holdings were purchased for the most part during 1869–1871. The collection includes the first drawing by Albrecht Dürer to enter an American collection, as well as major sheets by masters such as Fra Bartolomeo, Boucher, and Fragonard. E. B. Crocker also purchased many drawings from artist-professors at Dresden’s Kunstakademie, showing a clear interest in the process of art making.  

The Crocker purchase was especially forward-thinking, since few collections of master drawings existed in the United States at the time. Serving in part as examples for students in the Sacramento School of Design, the drawings were consulted in the library and exhibited occasionally in the galleries. Once the study of master drawings developed in the 1920s and 30s in the United States, the Crocker collection found an enthusiastic audience, especially among specialists. 

Though the Crockers did not keep detailed records of their purchases, directors and scholars have worked on researching the collection since the museum’s founding. William Franklin Jackson, the Crocker Art Museum’s first director, invited the French expert Seymour de Ricci to study the drawings collection in 1919. The museum’s second director, Harry Noyes Pratt, brought more public attention to the drawings collection with a melodramatic story of re-discovering the collection in the museum’s basement. Pratt and the California Museum Association invited Alfred Neumeyer from the University of Berlin to study the drawings collection in 1935. Neumeyer’s network of scholars also came to study the drawings, bolstering the reputation of the collection through features in scholarly publications. Neumeyer’s network included Numa S. Trivas, the first scholar to fully catalogue the drawings collection. Trivas came to California in 1939 to cover the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco for a Dutch newspaper. He returned to the United States just before the start of World War I, arriving in Sacramento in early 1940 to begin cataloguing the drawings collection. In addition to cataloguing work, Trivas mounted multiple exhibitions of the Crocker’s drawings collection, and was recognized with the title of Curator of Drawings in 1941.