De Young Museum
fine arts museum located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
The de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco, California, United States, named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young. Located on the West Side of the city in Golden Gate Park, it is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, along with the Legion of Honor.
The museum received 999,645 visitors in 2023, ranking as the 22nd most-visited museum in the United States, and the 82nd most-visited art museum in the world. In 2024, the two combined museums were ranked 15th in The Washington Post's list of the best art museums in the U.S.
History
The museum opened in 1895 in one of the buildings originally constructed for the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (a fair modeled on the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of the previous year). It was housed in an Egyptian Revival architecture structure which had been the Fine Arts Building at the fair. The building was badly damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and was closed for a year and a half for repairs, reopening in November 1907.
Before long, the museum's steady development called for a new space to better serve its growing audiences. M. H. de Young responded by planning the building that would serve as the core of the de Young facility through the 20th century. Louis Christian Mullgardt, the coordinator for architecture for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, designed the Spanish-Plateresque-style building. The new structure was completed in 1919 and formally transferred by de Young to the city's park commissioners.
“De Young Museum” enters the record as fine arts museum located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Young, Museum and fine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“De Young Museum” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Young, Museum and fine provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1470276. VIAF identifies the subject as 202781784. The Library of Congress control number is n80051192. Authority coordinates are 37.771, -122.469. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2024, 1895 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “De Young Museum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.