Crocker Museum, Sacramento

Judge Crocker was one of the big four Sacramento businessmen and railroad magnates. Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, and Huntington are all depicted in paintings in the large main salon. Crocker is the one with the unconventional facial hair: a long pointy beard of all white hair without a mustache. It makes him look like a KKK member, but anyway...

The main salon is where more than 100 paintings are stacked floor to ceiling on all four walls. Thankfully for my neck there are no paintings on the ceiling. While this method of presentation does allow density of paintings, it does make the upper paintings very difficult to see. And paradoxically, they seem to have placed the smaller paintings up there. The reason might be that the larger paintings are more famous and well known, and it makes even less sense to have them put way up and out of the way.

Overall the museum is in much need for the expansion -- which is planned to be complete in 2010 -- to make room for more of the collection which seems reasonably good, although judging on the samples on view Crocker's partner Stanford clearly has a much more varied and higher quality collection at the Stanford University campus.