‘Jewel City’ in San Francisco pulls artworks from a 1915 world’s fair

A century has passed since San Francisco took a step toward becoming a cultural center of the West Coast by hosting the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This world’s fair celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and showcased the city’s recovery after the earthquake of 1906.

One of the fair’s most notable features was an ambitious art exhibition that included a vast selection of American paintings and sculptures as well as some lauded European works. Highlights from this exhibition have been assembled for a show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco titled “Jewel City,” which runs through Jan. 10.

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The curatorial team spent more than three years locating and securing for loan more than 200 works out of the estimated 20,000 originally exhibited. The resulting exhibition gathers works that haven’t been shown together for 100 years and likely will never been shown together again.

It includes Winslow Homer’s “Saco Bay” (1896), a seascape set near Prouts Neck, Maine, close to where Homer lived, as well as a painting of artists working “en plein air” (“The Sketchers,” 1913) by John Singer Sargent. Epic murals in addition to photographs by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham will be on display along with towering French works such as Claude Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral Facade” (1892), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.