A breathtaking collection of work celebrating 125 years of San Francisco's legendary museum The de Young is San Francisco's oldest art museum, treasured in a unique verdant setting. Beginning as the Golden Gate Park Memorial Museum in 1895, themuseum has been a valued center of world art and culture, serving the Bay Area and, increasingly, national and international visitors and scholars. A city museum since 1924, it joined the Legion of Honor in 1972 to become part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, together preserving and exhibiting the most widely inclusive art collections in the city. Over the years, the de Young buildings changed in telling ways, transforming to protect and present a continuously expanding array of objects and their histories.