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Palace of the Legion of Honor

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One summer a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to take a trip to San Francisco with my family. We went to the beach, found some excellent places to eat, and drove around the city for a day, looking for fun and interesting things to see. We had our GPS Navigation system with us, so we decided to look up nearby attractions.

“Palace of the Legion of Honor? What’s that?” I asked my husband.

“It sounds familiar. And cool. Let’s go there,” he replies.

So we do. Outside are two fantastic monumental sculptures, and that reminds him. “It’s a museum!” We’ve struck gold, because in our family, art is one of our highest priorities (happens when one of you is a sculptor). So we stop, drag everyone out of the car (including our very happy son, who gets carsick), and start toward the building.


It’s amazing. My husband stops to look at the outdoor sculptures before going in; El Cid (Spanish war hero) and Joan of Arc, by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Captivating. Stared for a long time, while kids ran around on the greenery, happy to be outside.
The building itself is gorgeous. We went inside, and I immediately noticed how many sculptures they had of Rodin’s. We took lots of pictures, though that sometimes seems pointless because photographs can never capture the brilliance of art in real life. The only reason I can think of that we take pictures of stuff like this is to help remind us of what it was like, since we can’t spend all our time in San Francisco. Or Paris, or Rome, or wherever it is you’re at.


They had a Claude Monet painting of Venice (I love his use of light colors, sort of a dreamlike painting), a marble by Houdon (if you’ve ever seen a sculpture in marble, you know what I’m talking about when I say that marble sculpture has an incredible paradisiacal quality to it), and several statues from ancient Greece and Rome by unknowns (but still amazing).


Unfortunately for me, it was during our museum visit that I started to feel sick. Lay on the ground, feverishly hallucinate sick. I thought I was getting the swine flu, but it turned out to be strep throat (lucky me). And so, because I couldn’t seem to stand under my own power anymore, I went outside to lie in the grass. I spent my time staring at Joan of Arc, enjoying the beauty of the sculpture and thinking about Joan of Arc herself and what her place and purpose was in history. I thought to myself, here is a reminder of what art should be. Beautiful in design and masterfully executed, thought-provoking and timeless.

Thanks to me, we had to leave before my husband really wanted to. Why is it someone always gets sick when you’re on vacation?

The next time you’re in San Francisco, the Palace of the Legion of Honor is a don’t-miss. Seriously, go. You’ll love it.
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