The story
In the art galleries here, in Stockton in California's Central Valley, many of the big 19th-century pictures still hang in the elaborate gold frames they arrived in. They were collected by Louis Terah Haggin, whose father had grown rich in California mining and land after the Gold Rush. From about 1900 he filled his New York homes with French academic painting just as it was going out of fashion, which let him buy well. The centerpiece is The Nymphaeum, a large canvas of nymphs painted in 1878 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a favorite of the Paris Salon. Rosa Bonheur, the French animal painter, is here with Gathering for the Hunt.
When Haggin died in 1929, his daughter Eila Haggin McKee and her husband Robert offered money to the San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society for its museum on two conditions, that it carry her father's name and that it add an art wing for his paintings. It opened in Victory Park in 1931. That is why the same building also tells the town's own story, with a Holt 75 Caterpillar tractor, a machine developed in Stockton, and the trunk from a notorious local murder case of 1906.
Elsewhere are landscapes by Albert Bierstadt, the painter of Yosemite and the American West, and since 2017 a gallery for J. C. Leyendecker, the illustrator who drew Saturday Evening Post covers for decades, much of it given by the artist's sister.
