The California Palace of the Legion of Honor stands on a headland in Lincoln Park, above the Golden Gate, and it is the quietest major museum in San Francisco — a serious European collection in rooms that are rarely crowded, which in a city of queues is a considerable recommendation in itself.
It is also built on a cemetery, which is not a ghost story but a documented fact that resurfaced, literally, during building work in the 1990s.
The museum opened in 1924 as a memorial to the Californians killed in the First World War, and it is a replica at roughly three-quarter scale of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris. The copy is faithful down to the inscription cut above the portal: Honneur et Patrie.
It exists largely because of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who grew up poor in San Francisco, married into a sugar fortune, developed a passion for French art and Rodin in particular, and spent years pushing the project through. She is generally identified as the model for the gilded Victory figure standing on the Dewey Monument in Union Square — so a visitor who has looked up at that statue has already seen the museum's founder.
Between March 1992 and November 1995 the building was closed for seismic strengthening, restoration and an underground extension of some three thousand square metres, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes with Mark Cavagnero. Accounts that put this work in the 1980s have the decade wrong.
Lincoln Park was Golden Gate Cemetery — also called the City Cemetery, and in practice the city's potter's field. It operated from 1870 until 1909, covered around eighty hectares, and held roughly twenty-nine thousand burials: the poor and the unclaimed, immigrants from Italy, Japan and France, and a substantial Chinese burial ground, all in segregated sections.
When the land passed to the parks commission in 1909 the graves were supposed to be moved to Colma, south of the city. Many were. A great many were not, and the Chinese section in particular was never properly cleared.
In 1993, excavating for the new underground galleries, workers uncovered around seven hundred bodies. Most of the cemetery is believed to lie beneath the golf course that surrounds the museum, undisturbed. It is a reminder that the memorial character of the building is not entirely a matter of architecture.
The holdings span more than six thousand years, which is worth stating because the figure usually quoted is four thousand — that is the approximate age of one object, the carved wooden figure of Seneb, rather than the range of the collection.
The core is European: painting and sculpture from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Old Masters to the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, with Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Seurat and a Monet Water Lilies among the names. There are tapestries and decorative arts across several centuries, a gilded Spanish ceiling of around 1500, and an eighteenth-century commode made for Horace Walpole.
Two parts of it deserve particular attention:
The same caution applies more broadly. The permanent collection occupies about twenty rooms with changing exhibitions alongside, and what is on the walls in any given month is not fixed.
The Legion of Honor and the de Young in Golden Gate Park are run together as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the two collections are deliberately complementary — European here, American and non-Western there.
Lincoln Park sits at the north-western corner of the city, and the plaza in front of the museum marks the western end of the Lincoln Highway, the first road laid out across the United States coast to coast. There is a plaque and a fountain in the south-west corner of the plaza recording it, which almost nobody notices.
The views are the other half of the visit: the bay, the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge from the terrace, with Lands End and its coastal path immediately below.
One correction to the older accounts, which describe the site as unexpectedly sunny. It is the reverse. This is the ocean side of San Francisco, and Lincoln Park is among the foggiest and windiest corners of a city that is already colder than visitors expect — see the San Francisco page for what the weather actually does. A clear morning downtown is no guarantee of a view from up here, and on a grey day the collection is the point and the terrace is not.