A gift to San Francisco from Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, the spirited wife of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, this museum houses Alma's collection of great sculptures by Auguste Rodin; a treasury of European art spanning some 4,000 years; and a spectacular trove of works on paper. Together, the Legion of Honor and the de Young museum form the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. At Alma's request, the building (1924, George Applegarth) was modeled after the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition's French Pavilion, itself a version of an 18C Parisian residence designated by Napoleon in 1804 as the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur. The new museum was dedicated on Armistice Day 1924 to the 3,600 Californians who had perished in World War I.Dance-related art and European decorative arts initially formed the core of the museum's holdings, along with one of the finest collections of works by French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) outside the Musée Rodin in Paris. In 1950, the Legion received the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts collection, an immensely important body of works on paper that today numbers 80,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and illustrated books. Other pre-modern works of painting and sculpture-including works by El Greco, Tiepolo, Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough and others-have been amassed by the museum over the years, forming the older half of the city-owned collection that continues into the modern era at the de Young in Golden Gate Park.