Guest Review: ‘Impressionist Paris’ at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

While the de Young museum in San Francisco has been hosting a globally advertised Impressionism exhibition from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, has been keeping quite a secret. It, too, is exhibiting a show on the Impressionists, and some have argued it is even more exquisite than one at the de Young.

Impressionist Paris: City of Lights, which will be showing at the Legion of Honor through September 26th, was originally planned to compliment the Impressionist paintings currently being exhibited at the de Young by detailing the history of the city of Paris itself. But the end result is an exhibition that deserves far more praise. Filled primarily with works on paper from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, which is housed in the Legion of Honor, many of these pieces are rarely shown to the public. This exhibition has given the Achenbach a chance to display some of their abundant collection, and for their new curator, James Ganz, to prove his worth by curating an show that rivals one of established Impressionist masterpieces. Not to be outdone, Impressionist Paris is filled with works by Cezanne, Degas, Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard, among others.

As I walked through the exhibition, I became even more excited as I entered each new gallery. While the first two rooms introduce the history of Paris with early photographs and newspaper images, Impressionist Paris really takes off in the third gallery. You’re greeted by Jean-Francois Raffaelli’s “Fashionable Young Woman on Boulevard des Italiens, Paris” – one of the few paintings in this exhibition, which draws you into the room. Each gallery after is full spectacular prints. I found myself drawn to many of the pieces that were part of L’estampe Moderne, a publications in the late 1890s whose covers were designed by Alphonse Mucha. To top off an excellent show, my favorite piece of art in all of San Francisco, ‘Eiffel Tower’ by Georges Seurat, can be found in the second to last gallery.

My only real complaint about this exhibition is the name. With two Impressionist exhibitions at two sister museums, both in San Francisco, more could have been done to distinguish the exhibit at the de Young, which is from Paris, from the exhibition at the Legion, which is about Paris. While they are both excellent art shows and definitely worth seeing, it can be rather frustrating to arrive at one museum, expecting to see the exhibition that is at the other.

Ashley Harrop is an Art Historian based in San Francisco and writes the No Onions Extra Pickles travel blog.

Georges Seurat, La Tour Eiffel 1889. Oil on canvas. 24 cm × 15.2 cm. © The Legion of Honor.

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