Crocker Art Museum. The Crocker Art Museum, formerly the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery, founded in 1885, is the oldest art museum west of the Mississippi River. Located in Sacramento, California, the museum holds one of the state's premier collections of Californian art. The collection includes American works dating from the Gold Rush to the present, European paintings and master drawings, one of the largest international ceramics collections in the U.S., and collections of Asian, African, and Oceanic art. Edwin B. Crocker, a wealthy California lawyer and judge, and his wife, Margaret Crocker, began to assemble a significant collection of paintings and drawings during an extended trip to Europe, from 1869 to 1871. Upon their return to Sacramento, they set about creating an art gallery in part of their grand home at the corner of Third and O streets. The gallery became of the hub of social activity in Sacramento, hosting benefits for local organizations and welcoming prominent visitors including the Hawaiian queen, Liliʻuokalani, President Ulysses S. Grant, and Oscar Wilde. E.B. Crocker died in 1875. In 1885, his widow, Margaret, created a public art museum when she presented the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery and collection to the City of Sacramento and the California Museum Association, in trust for the public, the contents of which were valued at the time at more than $500,000. In 1978, the Crocker Art Gallery was renamed the Crocker Art Museum. In 2002, to accommodate a burgeoning collection and the needs of the growing population of Sacramento and California's Central Valley region, the museum commissioned the firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates to design a major addition. The greatly expanded Crocker Art Museum opened on October 10, 2010. The Californian art collection includes works dating from statehood to the present. The core collection of early Californian art was assembled by Judge E. B. and Margaret Crocker in the early 1870s. Prominent in their collection are works by the German-American artist Charles Christian Nahl, who brought the large scale and copious detail of European history painting to works depicting the California Gold Rush. The Crockers commissioned five major works from Nahl, including Sunday Morning in the Mines. The Californian collection continued to expand, and now contains 150 years of painting, sculpture, and craft media covering genres that include Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, and features artists including early Sacramento painter Amanda Austin, Norton Bush, William Keith, Thomas Hill, Granville Redmond, Edwin Deakin, Guy Rose, Gottardo Piazzoni, Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Roland Petersen, David Park, Jess, Richard Diebenkorn, Mel Ramos, and Wayne Thiebaud. The collection also includes American art from the late 19th century to the present. American impressionists and modernists are a particular strength, with artists including Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Georgia O'Keeffe, Maynard Dixon, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, and Luis Cruz Azaceta. The collection of European art began with the Crocker family's trip to Europe, from 1869 to 1871. It was not a Grand Tour. The Crockers rented lodgings in Dresden for over a year, and traveled mostly in Germany. As a later director of the museum would write, Mr. Crocker was a novice and completely susceptible to a kind of fraud in his anxiety to become the possessor of a large collection of masterpieces. He acquired in his wholesale search a collection of more than 700 paintings, most of them not by the few famous names given him by the dealers in Munich and Dresden. However, among Crocker's purchases were a number of genuinely rare works by a broader array of artists than he realized, and for a brief time the Crockers possessed the largest private art collection in the United States. Along with paintings, the Crockers also acquired 1344 Old Master drawings and untold numbers of prints of rare craftsmanship. Systematic study of the origin and significance of these drawings began only in the 21st century. Of more certain provenance were the numerous German and Central European paintings Crocker purchased, many by artists who were alive and working at the time. These 19th-century paintings would form the core of the European collection, along with a number of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch Golden Age still lives and genre scenes, as well as French and Italian works of the 17th and 18th centuries.