William H. Crocker (1861,
Sacramento, CaliforniaSacramento is the capital of the U.S. state of California, and the county seat of Sacramento County. Located along the Sacramento River and just south of the American River's confluence in California's expansive Central Valley. With a 2007 estimated population of 460,242, it is the seventh-largest...
– 1937,
Burlingame, CaliforniaBurlingame is a city in San Mateo County, California. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula and has a significant shoreline on San Francisco Bay. The city is named after diplomat Anson Burlingame. It is renowned for many surviving examples of Victorian architecture and its high residential...
) founded and then later became the president of
Crocker National BankCrocker National Bank was a United States bank headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was acquired by and merged into Wells Fargo Bank in 1986.-History:The bank traces its history to the Woolworth National Bank in San Francisco...
. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover and
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
, where he was a brother of the
Delta Kappa EpsilonDelta Kappa Epsilon is a fraternity founded at Yale College in 1844 by 15 men of the sophomore class who, upon hearing that some but not all of them had been invited to join the two existing societies , instead elected to form their own fraternity...
fraternity (Phi chapter). He donated the Crocker family's Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral.
He was a member of the University of California Board of Regents for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's million-volt x-ray tube at the UC hostpital and the "medical" Crocker cyclotron used for neutron therapy at the Berkeley.
Crocker also chaired the Panama-Pacific Exposition Committee and SE Community Chest, and was a key member of the committee that built the
San Francisco Opera HouseSan Francisco Opera is the second largest opera company in North America after the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. It was founded in 1923 by Gaetano Merola...
and Veterans Building. Crocker was the founder of
Crocker Middle SchoolWilliam H. Crocker Middle School is a public middle school located in Hillsborough, California, a suburb about south of San Francisco, as part of the Hillsborough City School District. Other schools in this district include South, North and West Elementary Schools...
located in
Hillsborough, CaliforniaHillsborough is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hillsborough is one of the wealthiest places in America and has the highest income of places in America with populations of at least 10,000. It is located seventeen miles south of San Francisco on...
.
When much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the
1906 earthquakeThe San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco, CA and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 A.M. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a moment magnitude of 7.8; however, other values have...
, William Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction.
His father,
Charles CrockerCharles Crocker was an American railroad executive.-Early years:Crocker was born in Troy, New York to a modest family, and moved to an Indiana farm at age 14. He soon became independent, working on several farms, a sawmill, and at an iron forge...
(1822-1888), had been a builder of the
Central Pacific RailroadThe Central Pacific Railroad was the California-to-Utah portion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America.Many proposals to build a transcontinental railroad failed because of the disputes over slavery in Washington; with the secession of the South, the modernizers in the Republican...
.
In the 1890s, his wife, in part, lent
William Kingston VickeryWilliam Kingston Vickery was an Irish-American picture dealer. His art exhibitions are credited with bringing French Impressionism to the attention of Californians....
, owner of the San Francisco art gallery
Vickery, Atkins & TorreyVickery, Atkins & Torrey was an interior design firm and art gallery in San Francisco, California, that helped introduce California to Impressionism...
, a number of French Impressionist paintings. Vickery then supervised a series of these loan exhibitions in San Francisco and introduced
ImpressionismImpressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...
to
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
in the form of paintings by Monet,
Eugene BoudinEugène Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors.Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores...
,
Paul CézannePaul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century...
,
Camille PissarroCamille Pissarro was a French Impressionist painter. His importance resides not only in his visual contributions to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also in his patriarchal standing among his colleagues, particularly Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.-Early life and work:Jacob-Abraham-Camille...
,
Pierre-Auguste RenoirPierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style...
, and
Edgar DegasEdgar Degas
[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas , was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
. These pictures were lent by California Impressionist
Lucy BaconLucy Angeline Bacon was a Californian artist who studied in Paris under the famous Impressionist, Camille Pissarro...
(who studied in
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
under Pissarro and met Cézanne), as well as Mrs. William H. Crocker, who was the leading California patron of French Impressionist art at the time.
His uncle's home in
Sacramento, CaliforniaSacramento is the capital of the U.S. state of California, and the county seat of Sacramento County. Located along the Sacramento River and just south of the American River's confluence in California's expansive Central Valley. With a 2007 estimated population of 460,242, it is the seventh-largest...
, was converted into the
Crocker Art MuseumThe Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, USA has operated continuously longer than any other art museum west of the Mississippi River. Founded in 1885, it boasts an excellent collection of early California art including important works of Albert Bierstadt, Xavier Martinez, William Keith,...
and was the first art museum to open in the West.
His nephew,
Harry CrockerHarry Crocker was a film star of the 1920s and who starred in Charlie Chaplin's The Circus in 1928. He was Chaplin's personal assistant until he was sacked during the making of Chaplin's City Lights in 1930...
, was a movie star in the 1920s and, at one time, the personal assistant of
Charlie ChaplinSir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE was an English comedic actor and film director. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid Classical Hollywood era of American cinema.Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced and...
.
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