Tourism and the Crocker Mosaic Table

Along with purchasing hundreds of paintings and drawings while on their 1870 Grand Tour, Margaret Crocker and her husband Judge E. B. Crocker also collected furniture, sculpture and tapestries from Europe.

Their goal was to acquire objects of fine art to fill their newly renovated home at 3rd and O Streets, thereby bringing some of the old country to the rough and tumble new state of California.

Micromosaic table top, c. 1870
Cesare Roccheggiani
drawn glass tesserae
Crocker Art Museum

Their sojourn, similar to the travels of many other wealthy Americans in the second half of the 19th century, led them through Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, where the couple would identify objects for purchase with the assistance of art agents and gallery curators.

These objects would then be shipped to California, in many instances arriving in North America before the Crockers themselves returned home.

San Francisco Chronicle · Tue, May 16, 1871 · Page 2

This table is attributed to Cesare Roccheggiani, an Italian artist working in Rome who often catered to tourists. Table-top souvenirs such as this one would usually be sold without a base, which probably explains the last sentence in the news article announcing its arrival to the Golden State. 

San Francisco Chronicle · Fri, Aug 4, 1871 · Page 3

In this 1871 San Francisco Chronicle clip, the table is presented almost as though it were a person, with an invitation to the public to attend an open viewing of it. In a new state and a rough and tumble city, the Chronicle, which was only six years old at the time, was already on the cutting edge of culture and arts promotion in California.

Billed as a "beautiful specimen" that cost 10,500 francs -- the equivalent of about $5,000 in 1870 dollars -- this mosaic table top depicts views from the city of Rome, including St. Peter's Cathedral and the Roman Coliseum. Unlike the easily disposable tourist souvenirs one might purchase today, Roccheggiani's work was expensive then and is quite valuable on the contemporary market now.

Micromosaic table top  c. 1865
Cesare Roccheggiani rosso antico
Piraneseum

For example, one of his micro-mosaic panels recently sold at auction for $32,400. Another object, similar to the table top found at the Crocker, was exhibited at the SFO Museum in 2017, while yet a third large micromosaic has been estimated by Sothebys at valuation over $150,000.

If this micromosaic table is any indication, Margaret Crocker and her husband had a good eye for art and the artists who made them.

It is likely that the City of Sacramento, to whom the Crockers bequeathed their museum-home and all the art works in it, are grateful that Margaret Crocker did not say, as Mark Twain did upon his return from a Grand Tour in 1869, "I know that an exorbitant export duty is exacted upon all pictures painted by the old masters, in order to discourage the sale of those in the private collections. I am satisfied, also, that genuine old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm. I proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded not to take it."

Had she done so, we would not have one of the finest art museums in California.