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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 [[legion of honor|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 Brettville Le Normand-Spreckels.
During seismic retrofitting in the 1980s, coffins and parts of skeletons were found; the area around the building was a Potter's Field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery"
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]], [[Thomas Gainsborough|Gainsborough]], [[Jacques-Louis David|David]], and many of the [[impressionism|impressionists]] and [[post-impressionism|post-impressionists]] - [[Edgar Degas|Degas]], [[Pierre-Auguste Renoir|Renoir]], [[Monet]], [[Camille Pissaro|Pissaro]], [[Georges Seurat|Seurat]], [[Cézanne]] and others. There are also representative works by key [[twentieth century]] figures such as [[Braque]] and [[Picasso]].
The museum building occupies a fine elevated site in [[Lincoln Park, San Francisco|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 is currently (2003) being erected in the [[Golden Gate Park, San Francisco|Golden Gate Park]]. ==External link==
*[http://www.thinker.org/legion/index.asp Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Legion of Honor page]
[http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/siege/docs/PAR00263.html] Photo of Hôtel de Salm, Paris
[[Category:Museums in San Francisco]]
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