California Palace of the Legion of Honor

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Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California.

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor (often abbreviated to simply Legion of Honor by locals) is a fine-art museum in San Francisco, California. The name is used both for the museum collection and for the building in which it is housed.

The building gets its name from the fact that it is a three-quarters scale imitation of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris. The design was based on a model of the Hôtel de Salm that appeared at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition, so it is not an exact copy. It was given to the City of San Francisco by Alma de Bretteville Le Normand Spreckels.

In 1924 John D. Spreckels commissioned the Ernest M. Skinner Company of Boston to build the Symphonic Organ. The museum organ, which is housed inside the museum above the main galleries, has 4 manuals and pedals, 7 divisions, 63 ranks, with a total of 4,526 pipes. Symphonic music is especially effective on the museum organ with its battery of pneumatically-operated percussion instruments and set of tubular chimes. A thunder pedal is used for the musical representation of storms. The organ's console, made of mahogany, ivory, and ebony, is located in the A.B. and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels Rodin Gallery. The apse of the gallery is canvas, painted to look like marble in order to allow the organ to "speak" through the dome. The frieze over the main entrance to the museum is made of plaster and can be opened so that the music can be heard in the Court of Honor also containing ten large tubular chimes and a heroic fanfare register concealed behind doors that can be opened during performances. The museum hosts a weekly organ recital from 4:00-5:00pm every Saturday and Sunday.

The museum contains a representative collection of mainly European art. Its most distinguished collection is of sculpture by Rodin: casts of all his most famous statues are on display, including one of "The Thinker" in the forecourt. However there are individual works by many of the most important artists, including Rembrandt, Gainsborough, David, El Greco, Rubens, and many of the impressionists and post-impressionists - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissaro, Seurat, Cézanne and others. There are also representative works by key twentieth century figures such as Braque and Picasso, and works of contemporary artists like Gottfried Helnwein and Robert Crumb.

Highlights of the collection include:

Adam and Eve. Albrecht Durer, 1504
St. Francis Venerating the Crucifix. El Greco, 1595
St. John the Baptist. El Greco, 1600
The Tribute Money. Peter Paul Rubens, 1612
The Age of Bronze. Auguste Rodin, 1875
Trotting Horse. Edgar Degas, 1881
The Kiss. Auguste Rodin, 1884
The Grand Canal. Claude Monet, 1908
Water Lilies. Claude Monet, 1914

The museum building occupies an elevated site in Lincoln Park in the northwest of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the surrounding Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the site of a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867. The cemetery was closed in 1908 and the bodies were relocated to Colma. During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s however, coffins and parts of skeletons were found^{[citation needed]}.

The collection is managed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which also manages the De Young Museum, for which a new building was completed (2005) in Golden Gate Park.

The plaza and fountain in front of the Palace of Legion of Honor is the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. The terminus marker and an interpretive plaque are located in the southwest corner of the plaza and fountain, just to the left of the Palace.