Arts: In San Francisco

Mrs. Adolph Bernard Spreckels, wife of one of the sugar-gas-transit-charity dispensers of San Francisco, was Alma De Bretteville, great-grand-daughter of a French Marquis, Colonel in Louis XVI’s Swiss Hundred. A lover of things French, she conceived and carried out the idea of duplicating in marble the French pavilion at the San Francisco Exposition of 1915, a reproduction by Henri Guillaume, French architect, of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Paris, which was built in 1786 for the Prince Salm-Salm, from designs by Rousseau (not Jean Jacques). It is a small but charmingly graceful and dignified structure. The city of San Francisco donated the site in Golden Gate Park. The building will house a permanent art collection, chiefly of French art. Rodin, before he died, selected for it 30 sculptures including two of his own. The California sculptor, Arthur Putnam, is generously represented. Gobelin tapestries and Sèvres vases were contributed by the French Government, and the Queens of Rumania, Yugoslavia and Greece sent examples of their respective national arts. Marshal Joffre laid the cornerstone; Marshal Foch planted a tree in the garden of the “palace.”