On February 19, 1921, upon sandy dunes overlooking the Golden Gate, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels laid the cornerstone for what would become the Legion of Honor.

The inspiration for the building came six years earlier, during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where Alma fell in love with the French Pavilion. That temporary structure was modeled on the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, built between 1782 and 1787 as the private residence of a German prince. Alma and her husband, Adolph B. Spreckels, requested permission from the French government to replicate the historic palace once again for a new art museum they gave to the city of San Francisco. 

When it came to the building’s design, there was only one man for the job: George Adrian Applegarth, an architect from Oakland who served as a sort of personal architect to the Spreckelses. He designed their mansion on Washington Street, built in 1912. Applegarth adapted the plans for the French Pavilion designed by Henri Guillaume. He created a new version of the building that included 19 galleries, a tearoom, and a theater. Two of the galleries were originally garden courts, decorated with real plants and sculpture.

Architectural drawings in our collection reveal the complexity of the design process. Drawings for the entrance rotunda and Gallery 10 reveal one of the building’s charms: the domes are partly constructed out of fabric and painted to resemble stone, concealing the 4,526 pipes of a massive organ integrated into the architecture.

Over the course of three and a half years, the Legion took shape stone by stone, through hard labor — only fleetingly visible in the photographs taken during construction. Scaffolding on the dunes gradually gave way to a temple built to house works of art for many generations, fulfilling the aims of the museum’s founders: “To honor the dead while serving the living.”

In 1928, the Legion of Honor hosted an important annual exhibition of contemporary art featuring some 250 paintings. The Carnegie International found an appropriate home at the museum: in its early years, as the collection grew largely through gifts, the Legion regularly played host to contemporary artists.

Many of these artists had strong ties to the Bay Area. In 1930, the Legion hosted an exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and drawings by Diego Rivera, who first came to San Francisco in 1928 to paint a mural (the Allegory of California, in the former Stock Exchange). Chiura Obata, who had arrived in San Francisco from Japan in 1903, showed paintings and woodblock prints alongside his father’s work in 1931. Exhibitions of art by women — such as Mary Curtis Richardson, who painted portraits of San Francisco society at her Russian Hill studio — regularly formed part of the museum’s programming.

This remarkable dimension of the museum’s history was not limited to its formative years. Local artists showed at the Legion well into the 1960s, often only for a month or so. There were photographs by noted Bay Area artist Jerry Stoll in 1962, paintings by California College of the Arts alumna Janet Schrock Jones in 1963, drawings by SF artist Kaffe Fasset in 1964, and ceramics by SF-born Beatrice Wood in 1965.

Today, the Legion’s connection to contemporary art is reflected in a series of interventions by contemporary artists throughout the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces, including exhibitions by Wangechi Mutu in 2021 and, in November 2025, by Yinka Shonibare.

The Legion has also featured ambitious large-scale shows since its early days. The inaugural exhibition in 1924 consisted primarily of works of art on loan from the Louvre and private collections. In 1929, Contemporary American Sculpture filled the galleries and even the grounds with more than 1,300 sculptures. The 1932 Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists, organized by the Harmon Foundation, provided opportunities for established and emerging Black artists (including members of the Harlem Renaissance) to show, promote, and sell their work.

Exhibitions with an international profile became central to the Legion’s program after the 50th anniversary, always involving huge efforts on the part of the museum’s staff. One particularly memorable exhibition, Five Centuries of Tapestry in 1976, was the result of a years-long research project led by a docent named Anna Bennett.

When the Legion of Honor opened in 1924, the surrounding neighborhood, already known as the Richmond district, was still developing. In the early 20th century, the neighborhood was populated largely by working-class families, primarily of Irish and German descent. Some members of the Legion’s small staff in the early years were Richmond residents: the organist Uta Waldrop lived on McLaren Avenue, while the building engineer and the head janitor lived on Clement Street.

The Mississippi-born sculptor Arthur Putnam, whose work formed part of the museum’s founding collection, also had ties to the neighborhood. Putnam arrived in San Francisco in 1894. Research by Nicole Meldahl of the Western Neighborhoods Project has revealed that Putnam eventually set up a studio and a foundry on 45th Avenue and Fulton Street. There, the sculptor received visits from one of his chief patrons: Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. Shortly after his death in 1930, the Legion presented an exhibition devoted to his sculpture.

The introduction of electric streetcars helped spur growth in the Richmond and granted San Franciscans access to the neighborhood’s various attractions, including the Legion. The museum’s director, Cornelia B. Quinton, reflected on this in a letter written in January 1928.

Today, the Richmond is a thriving neighborhood, noted by Time Out as one of the world’s coolest. The neighborhood is still home to a diverse population — from Chinese American families to a Russian community in what is known as “Little Russia.” And the Richmond continues to be home to the Legion of Honor, San Francisco’s own French palace, devoted to sharing art with the community for the past 100 years.

By the numbers

• 6 — locations where the Salon Doré has been installed since it was originally built for the Hôtel de La Trémoille in Paris in 1781
  

• 9 — museum film and TV appearances: Sudden Fear (1952), Vertigo (1958), The Rogues (Episode: “Gambit by the Golden Gate,” 1965), Mission: Impossible (Episode: “Speed,” 1973), The Streets of San Francisco (Episode: “Beyond Vengeance,” 1973), The Black Bird (1975), Raising Cain (1992), Tales of the City (Episode: #1.6, 1993), The Wedding Planner (2001)
• 12 — directors and acting directors since the museum’s founding: Cornelia B. Sage Quinton, Melvin Earl Cummings, Lloyd LaPage Rollins, Walter Heil, Thomas Carr Howe, Jr., Jermayne MacAgy, Ian McKibbin White, Harry S. Parker III, John E. Buchanan, Jr., Colin B. Bailey, Max Hollein, Thomas P. Campbell 
• 73 — most exhibitions held at the museum in a single year (1943)
• 300 — artists represented in the 1929 Contemporary American Sculpture exhibition
• 4,526 — number of pipes in our 1924 pipe organ
  

• 7,000 — years of art represented in our collections
• 35,000 — square feet added during the 1992–1995 renovation by architects Edward Larrabee Barnes and Mark Cavagnero 
• 90,000+ — artworks in our works on paper collection, one of the largest in the world

Facts

• The Legion of Honor was modeled on the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, built in the 18th century, but at three-quarter scale of the original. 
• Upon the Legion’s founding, the museum received gifts from the French government (including a tapestry series on the life of Joan of Arc and a collection of Sèvres porcelain) and antiquities from the Queen of Greece.
  

• The Legion predates the Golden Gate Bridge, which was inaugurated in 1937. When the museum opened, before trees were planted among the sand dunes, it had an unobstructed view of the ocean and Golden Gate.
• Rodin’s The Thinker (ca. 1880, cast ca. 1904) has been in the Court of Honor since the Legion’s opening on November 11, 1924.
  

• Our Torso of Hermes After Polykleitos (2nd century AD) was donated by Vincent Price, who also narrated a 1966 documentary featuring the de Young.
• The music from our 1924 pipe organ is projected into (and outside) the museum through canvas that is painted to look like stucco, seamlessly integrated into the architecture.
• During World War II, the Legion’s director, Thomas Carr Howe Jr., served in the United States military and subsequently worked as a Monuments Man to retrieve works of art stolen by the Nazis. 
• Alma de Bretteville Spreckels had many celebrity friends sign her personal guest book, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dalí, who signed on the same page!
  

• Upon her death, Alma lay in state in the Legion of Honor’s central gallery on August 12, 1968.
• On May 15, 1992, with the galleries emptied and ready for renovations after the 1989 earthquake, the Legion of Honor hosted a public party called “The Seismic Follies,” inviting visitors to roller-skate in the galleries and partake in casino games, bowling, and archery.
  

Firsts

• The Legion of Honor was the first major museum dedicated solely to art in San Francisco.
• The Legion’s first director, Dr. Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, was also the first woman director of any major American art museum (the Albright Art Museum, from 1910 to 1924).
• In 1946, the Legion held the first Spring Annual, a first-of-its-kind, juried painting competition in the Western United States, showcasing contemporary artists. Today, the tradition lives on in the de Young Open.
• In 1948, the Legion hosted the first solo exhibition by painter Richard Diebenkorn.
• The museum hosted the first major exhibition of contemporary art by Japanese artists post-World War II, Contemporary Japanese Painting, in 1952.
• The first Bouquets to Art was held at the Legion in April–May 1985. In celebration of the Legion of Honor 100, the program will be hosted at both the de Young and Legion in 2025.
• Our first website, thinker.org, launched in 1996, was also the first museum site with an online searchable collections database.