William H. Crocker

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)

William H. Crocker (born 1861, Sacramento, California — died 1937, Burlingame, California) founded and then later became the president of Crocker National Bank. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale University. He donated the Crocker family's Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral.

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 House and Veterans Building. Crocker was the founder of Crocker Middle School located in Hillsborough, California.

When much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the 1906 earthquake, William Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction. He was a University of California regent for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's second cyclotron.

In the 1890s, his wife, in part, lent William Kingston Vickery, owner of the San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey, a number of French Impressionist paintings. Vickery then supervised a series of these loan exhibitions in San Francisco and introduced Impressionism to California in the form of paintings by Monet, Eugene Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. These pictures were lent by California Impressionist Lucy Bacon (who studied in France 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, California, was converted into the Crocker Art Museum and was the first art museum to open in the West.^{[citation needed]}

His nephew, Harry Crocker, was a movie star in the 1920's and, at one time, the personal assistant of Charlie Chaplin.