The Crockers rented lodgings in Dresden for over a year, and traveled mostly in Germany.[1] As a later director of the museum would write, "Mr. Crocker was a novice and completely susceptible to a kind of fraud in his anxiety to become the possessor of a large collection of masterpieces. He acquired in his wholesale search a collection of more than 700 paintings," most of them "not by the few famous names given him by the dealers in Munich and Dresden."[9] (Works said to be by Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and even Leonardo da Vinci appear in the initial 1876 catalogue, but were reattributed in following decades.)[10][11][12][13][14] However, among Crocker's purchases were a number of genuinely rare works by a broader array of artists than he realized, and for a brief time the Crockers possessed the largest private art collection in the United States.[5]