The California Palace of the Legion of Honor
Legion of Honor
San Francisco (USA)
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19 sections and 392 items available
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El Camino Del Mar and 34th Avenue - San Francisco, CA 94121
Hours:
Open daily excepted monday
de 09h30 à 17h00
| Description | | |
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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.
During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s, coffins and parts of skeletons were found; the area around the building was a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867.
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 a fine elevated site in Lincoln Park in the north-west of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of today's Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the burial site that was closed in 1908 and the bodies supposedly were transferred to Colma.
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.
| History | | |
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En 1915, Madame Alma Spreckels tomba en admiration devant le pavillon français construit pour l'exposition internationale de San Francisco. Ce bâtiment était la réplique du palais de la Légion d'honneur à Paris, élevé au XVIIIe siècle sur la rive gauche de la Seine et appelé à l'origine "Hôtel de Salm". Il avait été conçu par l'architecte Pierre Rousseau en 1782 pour le Prince Frédéric III de Salm-Kyrbourg. Il fut ensuite acquis en 1804 par l'État pour y installer l'Ordre de la Légion d'honneur.
Alma Spreckels persuada son mari, Adolph B. Spreckels, un magnat du sucre, de faire du bâtiment le nouveau musée d'art de la ville de San Francisco. Lorsque l'exposition de 1915 fut terminée, le gouvernement français donna l'autorisation d'édifier une réplique permanente ; mais la Première Guerre mondiale interrompit les travaux jusqu'en 1921.
Aménagé sur un site baptisé "le bout-du-monde" (Land's End), le musée ouvre ses portes le 11 novembre 1924 en mémoire des soldats californiens morts sur les champs de bataille du nord de la France.
L'architecte George Applegarth avait souhaité un musée moderne dans un modèle réduit aux trois-quarts du bâtiment original de Paris. Il a été rénové et agrandi par Edward Larrabee Barnes et Mark Cavagnero entre 1992 et 1995 pour renforcer sa structure, travaux rendus nécessaires par le risque sismique dans la région.
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