The story
The Forest Lawn Museum stands inside a cemetery. Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, just north of downtown Los Angeles, was shaped by the businessman Hubert Eaton into a burial ground filled with art, and its museum opened in 1952. Admission is free.
Its best-known painting was bought for a chapel. In 1940 Forest Lawn acquired Song of the Angels, a large canvas by the French academic painter William Bouguereau, first shown at the Paris Salon of 1881 and later part of the Wanamaker collection in Philadelphia. The Virgin holds the sleeping Christ Child while three angels make music beside her, and a tall Gothic-style wooden frame was built for it at Forest Lawn, a frame still in use. In 2005 conservators at the Getty Center in Los Angeles cleaned the picture and showed it there with Bouguereau's preparatory sketches.
Around it the museum keeps bronze and marble sculpture, coins, and medieval and Renaissance stained glass bought in 1954 from the collection of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Nearby, the Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection holds Jan Styka's enormous painting The Crucifixion, which the Polish artist brought to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
