Californian & American Art

Works from these collections are on view on the Museum's third floor.

The Crocker Art Museum houses one of the state's premier collections of Californian art, offering the most comprehensive collection of art from the Gold Rush to the present. The Crocker now boasts 150 years of painting, sculpture, and craft media covering genres that include Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, and features artists such as Thomas Hill, Guy Rose, Joan Brown, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Early Californian Art
The collection of Californian art was initially assembled by Judge E.B. and Margaret Crocker in the early 1870s. Among the highlights are Charles Christian Nahl's Sunday Morning in the Mines, Thomas Hill's Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite, and William Hahn's Market Scene, Sansome Street, San Francisco. Works by Albert Bierstadt, Samuel Marsden Brookes, Albertus Del Orient Browere, and William Keith are among other landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes that help document both California 's history and its importance as a leading art center. In addition to the core collection assembled by the Crockers, the Museum has since added important examples by late 19th and early 20th century Californians, including signature works by Giuseppe Cadenasso, Xavier Martinez, M. Evelyn McCormick, Mary Curtis Richardson, and Theodore Wores.

Contemporary Californian Art
The Museum's collection of contemporary works by Californian artists includes more than 60 years of painting, sculpture, and craft media, and testifies to the artistic vitality of our state. Contemporary collection highlights include Robert Arneson's self-portrait Overcooked, Joan Brown's Wolf in Studio, Raymond Jennings Saunders' Joseph Fitzpatrick Was Our Teacher, Wayne Thiebaud's Pies, Pies, Pies, and Stephen Kaltenbach's Portrait of My Father. The collection also includes important paintings by Christopher Brown, Irving Norman, Oliver Jackson, Roland Petersen, Roy DeForest, and William Wiley, as well as outstanding three-dimensional works by Robert Brady, Stephen DeStaebler, Manuel Neri, Alan Rath, Peter VandenBerge, and Peter Voulkos.

American Art
The Museum's collection includes paintings and works on paper surveying American art from the late-19th century to 1945. Many of the late-19th century paintings trace the development of Impressionism in the United States. Among the collection’s highlights is Childe Hassam’s An Outdoor Portrait of Miss Weir (1909). Twentieth-century American Modernist movements are represented by Georgia O’Keeffe’s still life, It Was a Man and a Pot (1942), Marsden Hartley’s Fisherman’s Family (n.d.), and Rufino Tamayo’s Laughing Woman (1950). Other American artists include notables Edwin Blashfield, George de Forest Brush, Robert Henri, Guy Pène du Bois, Edmund Tarbell, and Rockwell Kent.