Crocker Collection

A civil engineer, a lawyer, a student of botany and ornithology was Edwin Bryant Crocker when he arrived in California in 1852. Before he died in 1875, fat, goat-bearded and wealthy, he had served a term on the State supreme court, helped Leland Stanford build the Central Pacific Railroad, filled his brick mansion and adjacent gallery in Sacramento with an extraordinary mess of stuffed birds, shells and European art acquired in Dresden and Paris on his one trip abroad. Ten years later his widow gave the treasures and the gallery to the city of Sacramento, which later acquired the mansion and for 50 years faithfully mowed the grass on the Crocker lawn. Curator of the gallery during all that time was an easy-going character named William Franklin Jackson, who let old Judge Crocker's paintings gather dust while he painted California landscapes.

Last year Painter Jackson died and was succeeded by slight, handsomely greying Harry Noyes Pratt, onetime editor, art student, poet (Mother of Mine & Other Verse, 1918) and director of a historical museum in Stockton, Calif. Director Pratt's first purchase was a vacuum cleaner, with which he took up two and one-half pounds of dust in his own room alone. Next thing he did was to clean and space the Crocker paintings, which had been jammed on the leaking walls like one-cent stamps on a special delivery letter. Then Director Pratt put on his old clothes and braved what he felt sure was a colony of Black Widow spiders in the basement. He discovered in old barrels and stacks no less than 2,000 prints and drawings which had never been cataloged.

When the Sacramento Union heard about this it began to call proudly for a new gallery to house the "$15,000,000" Crocker collection. Director Pratt rated his findings more modestly but his curiosity mounted from week to week. He decided that the old Crocker catalog was not only inadequate but frequently wrong, wrote and printed a new one. Last week Mr. Pratt hung up for Sacramento art lovers his first batch of newly discovered or identified pictures, declaring it "one of the most important art events of the West."

The world is full of secondary masterpieces which are continually discovered by people who never saw them before. Nevertheless it appeared last week that Director Pratt had unearthed a highly unusual hoard from the old Crocker cache. Of 60 drawings which have never been seen before in the U. S., the majority on display were by expert Flemish and Dutch draftsmen of the 16th and 17th Centuries: Nicolaas Berchem, Phillips Wouwerman, Willem van Bemmel, Jakob van Ruysdael, Rembrandt, Rubens. Among the paintings which had been cleaned off and hung decently were a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto, portraits by the Elder and Younger Lucas Cranach, a panel by Pieter ("Hell") Breughel, works of Poussin, Van Dyck, Guido Reni, Durer, Tintoretto.

Director Pratt was especially excited about a drawing which he is sure is the original study by Hans Holbein the Younger for his famed Progress of Riches, painted after 1532. Another discovery was a set of seven grotesque heads which had been attributed to Holbein. "I'll stake my reputation," said Director Pratt, "that these . . . are the work of Leonardo da Vinci."

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