The Collector Had a Good Eye

How did this spectacular collection end up in a mere “cow town”?

In the great Central Valley, a little more than an hour from San Francisco by car, there is a regional museum that houses a national treasure yet is virtually unknown. The Haggin Museum, in Stockton, contains one of the premier collections of 19th-century French and American paintings to be found anywhere.

During the first two-thirds of the previous century, impressionism and modernism completely displaced other schools of 19th-century art. But one collector, New York–based Louis T. Haggin, ignored this