Like the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, California Impressionist Franz A. Bischoff began his career as a china painter. As with his French forebear, he was adept at brushing luxurious images of flowers on the surfaces of elegant porcelain vases and plates.

A selection of his exquisite porcelains, decorated with roses, grapes, hollyhocks and other botanical delights, greets viewers in the hallway outside his exhibition of paintings and pottery on the second floor of the Crocker Art Museum.

Part of the museum's "Summer of Impressionism" series, "Gardens and Grandeur: Porcelains and Paintings by Franz A. Bischoff" opened last week and will run through Oct. 23.

Born in 1864 in Bavaria, where he mastered the craft of porcelain painting, Bischoff (no relation to Bay Area Figurative painter Elmer Bischoff) immigrated to the United States in 1885 and became one of the foremost porcelain painters of his day.

He won numerous awards and became known as the "King of the Rose Painters." Producing his wares and teaching others his techniques, he launched a lucrative career in the Midwest before moving to California in 1906.

Settling with his family in Pasadena, he was struck by the beauty of his new environs and began painting still lifes and landscapes of the rural areas around Los Angeles. Among his earliest works in the Crocker show is an almost sinfully beautiful still-life painting of roses on a tea table done in 1912. A riot of roses spilling from a basket and rising up from lovely vases against a backdrop of an oriental tapestry of birds and flowers graces a large canvas, also from 1912. Both bear witness to his primacy as a painter of roses and have a strong pleasure principle.

The still-life paintings give way to ingratiating landscapes of Arroyo Seco, the area where Bischoff made his home. "A Spring Poem" is an idyllic image of a mother and child in the woods near his home on Pasadena Avenue, and "Trimming Wisteria" is a scene of his wife in the backyard under magnificent clusters of lavender flowers. The latter is a marvelous piece of Impressionism with its bold colors, broken brushstrokes and the informality of the subject matter.

Leaning more toward realism, as is often the case with American Impressionists, "San Pedro Fishing Boats" captures a picturesque marina. It is followed by "Afternoon Idyll," a quaint scene of a small coastal town of humble houses and a yard filled with small figures and chickens.

A particularly fine image of "Arroyo Seco, Pasadena," circa 1918, belongs to the Crocker Art Museum, as a part of the magnificent Barr Collection of California Impressionists. Near it is a typical California landscape of spring flowers, including golden poppies and blue lupine. It's a ubiquitous subject among early California paintings, but nicely done. Less familiar is a scene of bathers in a mountain stream, a traditional subject with a feeling for California's light and color in the lovely pastels of the distant hills, and the cool tones of the shaded nudes in the foreground.

A colorful scene of Zion National Park in southwestern Utah follows, its vivid tones and simplified forms hinting at Bischoff's acquaintance with more modern styles of painting. An image of Mount Alice, however, fails to capture the grandeur of the place, looking like a poor man's Albert Bierstadt. More compelling is a lovely view of Emerald Cove in Carmel, again with small bathers giving a sense of the scale of the place, and the vivid and cool colors capturing the light of the Central Coast.

Organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Jean Stern, the executive director of the Irvine Museum, the show is accompanied by a catalog with essays by Stern and Crocker Chief Curator Scott Shields.

Offsetting the generally scholarly tone of the catalog is a remembrance by Stern of finding a treasure trove of Bischoff paintings at Peabody's Antiques in Sacramento, with many lively details about Bischoff's wayward son Oscar and the excitement of discovering the painter's works in an unexpected place.

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