Legion of Honour: Selected Works

A dramatic headland above the Golden Gate - where the Pacific Ocean spills into the San Francisco Bay - is the spectacular setting for the Legion of Honor, the museum that Alma de Bretteville Spreckels gave to San Francisco in 1924. The French neoclassical building, patterned after Napoleon's Legion d'Honneur in Paris, houses a prestigious collection of paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, works on paper, and textiles representing Mediterranean and European cultures from antiquity to the 21st century.
The Legion's extensive holdings include ancient art from Egypt, the near East, Greece, and Rome. The museum also features European masterpieces by Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Watteau, and Tiepolo, as well as 19th- and 20th-century works by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, and Rodin. The French furniture collection is one of the finest on the West Coast. Finally, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, which encompasses nearly 100,000 prints, drawings, and artists' books spanning six centuries, is the largest group of works of art on paper in the western United States.
This illustrated survey highlights selections from the Legion's renowned collection, each accompanied by an informative commentary.