Legion of Honor

On a bluff above the Pacific at the western edge of San Francisco stands a French palace that has no business being there. It is a three-quarter-scale copy of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris, built by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who had risen from poverty to marry a sugar fortune and fallen hard for one sculptor above all others.

That sculptor was Auguste Rodin. Alma met him in Paris and bought his work directly, and when the museum opened in 1924 as a memorial to the Californians killed in the First World War, its core was one of the great Rodin holdings in America. A bronze Thinker cast in Rodin's own lifetime sits in the entry court, so the pose greets you before you reach the door.

Inside, the collection has broadened over a century into European painting from the medieval period on, ancient art, and the Achenbach Foundation, one of the largest holdings of prints and drawings in the United States.