In 1893, a year of financial depression in San Francisco, M. H. de Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, decided that the West was in need of its own world's fair. As National Commissioner at large attending the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, de Young began to rally public enthusiasm at home. Upon his return he lobbied until the Golden Gate Park Commission granted Concert Valley for the exposition, under the condition that the area be returned to the city in such a state that permanent improvements could be carried out on the land. Only five months after the ground breaking the California Midwinter International Exposition opened on 2 January 1894 in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

History

Exhibitors at the fair had been asked to adhere to exotic eastern themes to contrast with the classical themes of the Columbian Exposition and to remind visitors that California, even in January was another exotic land of sunshine. Over 1,300,000 visitors in five months came to see the buildings laid out on the leveled sand hills of the park. When the fair closed on 4 July, despite the economic depression a profit of $126,991 had been made. The subject of starting a permanent museum in Golden Gate Park as a memorial to the exposition was a popular one in the press, so the Executive Committee of the fair, led by M. H. de Young, offered the Fine Arts building to the Park Commissioners, together with the surplus funds, for this purpose. After an initial reluctance the commissioners accepted. Thus, the first structure for the Memorial Museum, its link with an established world of culture from which it was separated by an ocean and a great continent, was in the Egyptian Revival style, adorned with images of Hathor the cow goddess.

The new Memorial Museum was a success from its opening 24 March 1895. No admission was charged, and most of what was on display had been acquired from the exhibits at the exposition, but de Young immediately began his own program of acquisitions. When he began acquiring objects for the museum, he found he had a lot to learn. At Tiffany's in New York he coveted a collection of antique knives and forks that he described as going back almost to Adam and Eve. Shocked at their price, he was told that he "didn't understand the museum game." Upon learning that part of what he was being asked to pay for was the years and expertise invested in bringing together the individual elements of the collection, de Young determined he would build his own. During the next twenty years his taste for the curious, intricate, and ornamental was reflected by acquisitions of painting and sculpture, arms and armor, fine porcelain, objects from South Pacific and American Indian cultures, including original art objects as well as reproductions. Visitors to the museum seem to have shared de Young's interest in such diverse objects as sculptures, polished tree slabs, paintings, a door reputedly from Newgate Prison, birds' eggs, handcuffs and thumbscrews, as well as two cases de Young had at last filled with a collection of knives and forks. Six thousand persons viewing the exhibits on a Sunday was considered not at all out of the ordinary.

Although de Young's interests were admittedly eclectic, it is nevertheless true that important objects in the Museums' permanent collections were acquired in the early days of the Memorial Museum's existence. Gustave Dore's Poeme de la vigne, known popularly as "The Dore Vase," was acquired from the exposition and is still part of the permanent collection of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The vase stands eleven feet high and twenty-two feet in circumference, the figures on its surface entwining in grape leaves that cascade down the swelling sides of six thousand pounds of cast bronze.

Important objects in the collection of ancient art and the art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas also entered the museum in these early days, much of the latter coming from the collection of the museum's first curator, Charles P. Wilcomb. One of de Young's early acquisitions, John Vanderlyn's painting Marius Amidst the Ruins of Carthage, is the work around which the collection of American art was subsequently built.

Before long the museum outgrew its buildings. De Young responded by planning the building that today is familiar to de Young Museum visitors. Louis Christian Mulgardt, the coordinator for architecture for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, designed the new Spanish Plateresque-style building that was completed in 1919 and formally transferred by de Young to the city's Park Commissioners. In 1921 de Young added a central section, together with the familiar tower, and the museum began to assume its present configuration. That year M. H. de Young's great efforts were honored when the museum's name was changed to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Yet another addition, a west wing, was completed in 1925, the year de Young died.

The resemblance to the present building was only partial, however, as the museum was encrusted with elaborate cast concrete decorations. The original Egyptian building was declared unsafe and demolished in 1929, and only twenty years later the concrete ornamentation of the de Young was called a hazard and removed, the salt air from the Pacific having rusted the supporting steel. Today a scattering of palm trees offsets the plain stucco facade of the museum that faces the Music Concourse and the California Academy of Sciences.

The two museums that had been deeded to the City of San Francisco by their founders had, under the city's administration, shared directors during the thirties, though no official merger took place at that time. The Legion's first official director was Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton. She was followed in 1930 by Lloyd L. Rollins who, during his three-year tenure, also assumed the directorship of the de Young Museum. Walter Heil came in 1933 and continued the dual directorship until 1939. That year Thomas Carr Howe, who had been an assistant director at the Legion since 1931, became its director, and Heil continued to guide the progress of the de Young until his retirement in 1961.

The de Young's collection remained one of immense variety, even up to the time of the opening in 1931 of a new unit that replaced the demolished Egyptian building. Walter Heil, director of the de Young from 1933 until his retirement in 1961, was responsible for the decision to focus the de Young's collecting policies and create a comprehensive museum of fine and decorative art. His predecessor, Lloyd Rollins, had begun to refine the collections; in furthering that process Dr. Heil chose to tactfully refuse personal keepsakes and household bric-a-brac, ending any perception of the de Young as the city's attic.

In the 1950s the de Young received a major gift from the Kress Collection. The de Young was able to acquire such masterworks as St. Francis Venerating the Crucifix by El Greco and Pieter de Hooch's Interior with Mother and Children as well as choice works by Salomon van Ruysdael, Luca di Tomme, Titian, and an outstanding work by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Triumph of Flora.

It was also through Heil that the de Young received a major collection, gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Roscoe F. Oakes of San Francisco that over a period of years filled five galleries, one of them an eighteenth-century period room. Among the paintings in the Oakes collection are such works as Rubens's Portrait of Rogier Clarisse and Gabriel Metsu's Woman Playing a Viola da Gamba. Hals, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Raeburn are also represented. In addition, the Oakeses provided a generous fund for art acquisition that continues to enrich the museums.

In 1972, the de Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor merged to form The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The merger was ratified by a large majority of San Francisco voters. Ian McKibbin White was appointed director of the newly formed institution. With the new organization, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor was designated a museum featuring the arts of France. Other national schools were to be represented at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.

One of lan White's goals was the establishment of an important center of American art. In 1973 The Fine Arts Museums became host to the West Coast Area Center of the Archives of American Art, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution, now located adjacent to the library in the de Young Museum. Four years later, on 4 July 1973, the American Galleries were inaugurated, and in January 1978 Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd announced their intention to give the Museums more than one hundred works from their collection of American art. Much of the collection came to the Museums in 1979, after Mr. Rockefeller's death. Additional support arrived soon afterward when Mrs. Ednah Root offered to fund a curatorial chair in American art.

Another area of the Museums' collections grew impressively when H. McCoy Jones placed in the Museums his collection of more than five hundred rugs, carpets, and embroideries from the Near East and Central Asia. The surprise bequest of Teotihuacan murals from the Harald Wagner Estate enriched the collections of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

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