We arrived in San Francisco on September 2, and stayed at wonderful Hotel Cornell de France on Bush, between Union Square and Nob Hill.  The Cornell is a nice small hotel, run by a French couple from Orleans, with attached French restaurant, “Jeanne d’Arc” downstairs, with its Medieval dining hall appearance.  Wonderful breakfasts with rich French coffee in the quiet setting.  The rooms are small, and decorated with French art– our room had one of my favorites, the Fauvist Raoul Dufy.  The only  problem for me, in staying there, was that I was constantly confused, expecting to step  from the lobby into Paris’ Latin Quarter.  But, San Francisco did actually have a lot in common with Paris.  Both are elegant large cities with a sense of life to them.  San Francisco, I was reminded, is the most attractive U.S. city, mainly because it is on the Pacific Ocean, but also due to its Asian influence, hills, and unique architecture: a mixture of Beaux Arts and Victorian.  Unlike Paris, or most large American cities, San Francisco was not so fast paced.  Taxis cruised down red painted taxi lanes in the middle of three-laned one way streets, and pedestrians were not hurried at intersections.  Traffic, even rush hour, seemed to flow, and with little honking involved.  There were not a lot of diesel spewing busses, and no metro stations.  The city did not seem  that densely packed downtown.   Maybe I just haven’t seen it enough.  The taxi drivers were friendly and chatty, and the fares moderate, running around twelve to fifteen dollars across town.  There are not a lot of taxis crowding the streets in swarms of yellow, jumping lanes.

The overall impression was of a beautiful mixture of International Style modern skyscrapers and and neo-classical masonry office buildings, mixed with three story Victorian apartments, and the brisk 66 degree weather.  Light jackets appeared around 6 p.m.  White cumulous clouds decorated a medium blue sky, above the wonderful panoramas of the sea from the various sections of the city.  Especially beautiful was the view from Lincoln Park.  I was struck by the diversity and the collective atmosphere, of the communities of Asians and Hispanics, rather than the individualistic feeling of smaller towns.  And, what great neighborhoods: Russian Hill, Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf, North Beach, Lombard, the Mission, Chinatown, etc, all distinct.  Union Square was elegant, clean, and European, without all the people, and with the beautiful Victory Column in the middle, benches, and a German style outdoor cafe, all surrounded by the Westin and attractive buildings belonging to Saks Fifth Avenue, Williams Sonoma, Macys, Tiffany, etc.  The Victory Column, dedicated to the late President McKinley by President Roosevelt in 1901, was a tribute to Admiral Dewey and his victory at Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War, interesestingly our first foray into the international arena.  It was hard not to think of where that has led– to Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine in the current newspapers.

And, it was cool outside.  We sat in the Starbucks on the 4th floor of Macys, and looked through the plate glass at the Square below and the red double decker, open-topped, tour busses going by, the passengers on top taking photographs and looking San Francisco happy.  And, we could see the 1915 stucco and brick, cream colored Chancellor Hotel next to the Westin,  where we had stayed when we became engaged.  We remembered our original engagement dinner at “Oriental Pearl,” formerly “China Pearl” Restaurant on Clay Street in Chinatown, down from Eastern Market Chinese Bakery.  Looking out at the square, my wife noticed that this was where they filmed, “The Conversation.”  Her comment reminded me of other San Francisco films:  Steve McQueen racing the streets of Russian Hill and North Beach in his green Mustang (we were on some of these streets the day before in a Toyota Prius taxi), and also Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in her wonderful apartment at Mason and Sacramento.  From a taxi window, I saw McQueen’s (Frank Bullitt’s) apartment in the 1100 block of Taylor.  You can still see his corner apartment and the grocery where he shopped. I did not see the newspaper rack that he forced open.

We had Pizza Magherita and gnocci Bolognese in North Beach at Restaurant deLillo, which reminded me of a European cafe, followed by gelato and pastries at Cafe Roma down the street, a venue decorated with Italian soccer jerseys, with its huge old red coffee grinder in front, and with background music playing early 60s music: “There she was just a walking down the street, singing oh wah daddy, daddy wah, daddy woo…”  and “I’d like to get to know you, yes I would….”   Went shopping at City Lights Bookstore and picked up a Philip Roth biography.  I happened, while browsing, to glance out the front window, and observed an open-topped red tour bus at the stop light, with a rather alert looking mother sitting up top, holding her blond two year old tightly around his waist with her left arm as he stood on her lap.  As the bus took off, the wind blowing their hair, the boy stretched both arms out, his smiling face a picture of joy, his mother hugging him, holding him tighter to her, while at the same time  extending her I-phone in front of his face with her right arm so he could watch the screen as they raced off.  Last I saw, he was bouncing up and down.  A captured glimpse of the joy of life.   That evening, we went to  the Davies Symphony Hall, with its beautiful cream colored interior and dark stained wood orchestra, and listened to the marvel of Ravel, Stravinsky, Tchiakovsky, and my ultimate favorite piece, the introduction to Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,”, which sent my spirits soaring above the glass acoustic panels hanging from the ceiling.  Sheri had to listen to my humming the refrain, like the wind zithering over the steppes: “zoom–ze zoom– ze zoom–ze zoom;    duh– de duh– de duh–de duh,” for days.

On our first full day in town, we took a cab to the Legion of Honor museum in Lincoln Park, a neo-classial replica of the French original, dedicated in 1924 and donated by the Spreckles (sugar) family, the same Mrs. Spreckles who collected the art, and who rose from a laundress to the heights of society in the Gilded Age, and who is the model for the bronze lady on the top of the Union Square Victory Column.  The Museum had  wonderful view of San Francisco bay and brought back memories of my earlier visit to the gallery with my childhood neighbor Larry Wilson, who was doing his residency in San Francisco.  It was one of many such visits to the ever hospitable Larry: in Washington D.C., Long Island, Washington Square, Albuquerque, etc.  It was a great loss when Larry died young, an engineering major, who read everything and played classical guitar, and studied English history and literature as a second major, and knew the ballads, and walked and re-walked British history on family trips to England, and built model rockets as a kid, and became a computer techie early on and worked for IBM in the 1970s  before Medical School, and bicycled across the U.S. west and up to Alaska, and  worked at a NASA tracking station under a college co-op program.  Wow.  He was a true Renaissance Man and had a great sense of humor.  A couple years ago, I ran into a university professor from my hometown of Roswell, New Mexico, who had  graduated from high school there in 1962.  When I asked if he knew Larry Wilson.  He smiled and said:  “Larry was the smartest person who ever graduated from Roswell High.”

Inside the wonderful museum, I listed my favorite items: There was the great collection of Rodin bronzes, but my favorite Rodin was an 1880 white plaster bust of Camille Claudel.  I also loved early Flemish Renaissance pieces, including two a ivory carvings, the first of mother and child, with her silver crown added later, and her beautifully carved folded robe, dated 1300-1350 from the Meuse Valley;.  The second a diptych panel–a small rectangular piece about two inches by one inch, showing a few crack lines running vertically in the ivory, entitled “Scene of the Crucifixion,” dated around 1350 from Middle Ages Germany, Rhenish.  So small and so elegant.

There was the best Rembrandt I have ever seen, a 1632 portrait of “Jaris de Cauleri,”  in brown suede coat and iron breast and neck plate, and his hair a bit fuzzy, and with an overall brown palette rather than the black we are used to with Rembrandt.  There was also the best Franz Hals I have ever seen, his 1631 “Portrait of a Gentleman in White,” again not the usual black, but with the sitter wearing a white cloak which dominated the canvas, and with his arrogant expression, his van Dyck beard, and slightly pronounced blood vessel in the forehead, set against the beautiful light gray background, and all done with broad brush strokes that were not readily visible.

I made a new discovery, Charles Daubigny, whose 1857 “Vision of Glaton,” with the thick paint illuminating the stream in the foreground, white Dover like buildings in the background, visible on an embankment, and an overall dark green landscape.  Sitting in the middle of the gallery was a 1910 bronze sculpture by another discovery, Rembrandt Bulgatti, related to the car manufacturer, a beautiful green animal sculpture entitled “Hamdryes Baboon,” a bit stylized and geometric, perhaps a bit cubist and marvelous.

In the Impressionist and post-impressionist gallery, there was a small Vincent Van Gogh, the 1886 “Shelter on Monmartre” from his Paris period, made with clashing brush strokes of cream, tourquoise, and white, displaying a small, delapidated building, almost a shack, and clear sky above.  There were no strong brush strokes you associate with van Gogh.  There was also a an Alfred Sisley, his 1891 “Banks of the Loing,” with a teal colored river in the foreground and mossy lighter teal colored trees on the opposite bank, the canvas almost a blending of green-blues.  There was a medium sized painting by Paul Cezanne of a forest scene, cubist, the canvas broken into brown sections of the landscape.  You can almost see how Hemingway learned to write from looking at Cezanne, deconstructing a scene into sections– Cartestian.  There were two two Degas’ items, an 1870  painting in gray chalk, “Musicians at the Orchestra,” showing the woodwinds, and an 1881 bronze sculpture: “Trotting Horse, Feet Not Touching the Ground.”  How wonderful to see the feet all in the air at once, flying for a moment.

Other favorites included a 1910 Russian tea service and table, the service in silver, with white ivory handles, the table of Karelian birch and lemonwood, and goldsmithing done by Faberge.  It was a gift from a benefactor, dedicated to the memory of the 5,600 California soldiers killed in World War I.  Downstairs were the archaic and classical sculptures, including some beautiful thin Cycladic marble figures of women, dated 2500 BCE, with arms crossed over the chest, and a 6th Century BCE small green Etruscan “Statuette of a Reclining Banqueter,” in bronze with the stylized Etruscan lines depicting draped folds in the banqueter’s robe.  In the gallery dedicated to porcelain, I admired the Sevres plates, especially one done by the decorator Auguste Berlin, entitled “Vase du Albert, 1921,”  white and plain, modernist, with chocolate brown lines creating vertical sections.   Near the gift shop, there was a beautiful Persian carving, dated 490 BCE, entitled “Relief of a Gift Bearer,” of brown colored bituminous limestone, from the Palace of Darius at Persepolis.  There was an Egyptian Late Period (525-337 BCE) Ibis with long pointed beak in green and tan, made of bronze and wood.  And, finally, there was the small wooden piece, from Middle Period Egypt (1985-1836 BCE) entitled “Scribe of the Royal Ducs,” with the scribe carrying his writing material, in Kourous, mid-step pose, one leg extended while walking straight backed, wearing a white robe from waist down, and using natural grains in the wood to create human contours.   There was also a wonderful Matisse Exhibit, on loan from the San Francisco MOMA which is under renovation, including the signature item– the 1908 “Girl with the Green Eyes,” adorned with coral colored blouse. I admired Matisse’s colors and simple lines and learned that Matisse and San Francisco were connected, that San Francisco had a lot of Matisses early on due to a local collector, and that Matisse had been surprised buy the large crowds showed up at his arrival in San Francisco for his exhibit.

Those were my favorite items in the Museum, but there were a lot of other wonders as well, including Jan van Goyen’s “The Thunderstorm” (1641); van Ruysdael’s “View or Niminjem” (1648) with castle in the background; Anthony van Dyck”s Flemish “Portrait of a Lady,” (1620) in the usual black and white Dutch mode; a beautiful cabinet containing a house altar, done in Mainz in 1760 of walnut, fruitwood, and gilt bronze; a Faberge rectangular box, 3″x1″ with some filagree, from 1896; a Faberge cigarette case, rounded, made with jade diamonds and gold, dated 1910; a Camille Corot painting, “Banks of the Somme at Piequigay,” dated 1865, with boat and fishermen in the foreground, mossy trees beyond, and a spire in the distance; an Aristide Maillol female torso sculpture in guilt bronze entitled “Ile de France,” 1921; a Monet, “Water Breaking,” (1881), of strong waves breaking on the surf, all whites and blues, and touch of yellows mixed in; an interesting Monet, reminiscent of Manet’s studio boats, or Calliabote’s rowers, entitled “Sailboats on the Seine at Gannevillers,” (1874); a Renoir of a young child petting a cat, grabbing at the fur as the cat endures it, the mother telling the child to be gentle (1883); a Manet, “At the Millneres,” in black (1881); Jules Bastien Lepage (a new discovery) “Snow Effect,” (1882), with its snow covered fields and opal sky merging; a Cypriot sculpture dated 6th Century BCE, “Head of a Bearded Man,” in limestone, with curly beard and missing nose; a Sicilian sculpture of a “Dancing Woman,” in terracotta, with traces of polychrome, dated 2nd Century BCE; some lekythos and alabastron vessels, dated 460 BCE, with white ground background and black figure seated woman holding a mirror; and a red figure hydria, dated 470 BCE, with flying Nike holding phiale plates in each hand.

Before we left, we had Indian cuisine at New Delhi Restaurant, near Union Square, and Chinese at “Moon Over Cathay Restaurant” in Chinatown, pan fried tomato beef chow mein, in honor of Oakland family friend Max Powers, who led a noble life fighting for liberal causes.  On our way home, we had lunch at El Dorado Kitchen in Sonoma with a close friend and wonderful artist from Helena.  Life is good.