Saints Peter and Paul Church, San Francisco

 

Adolphine Sutro Fullerton

  1892 - 1974 (biography)

c. 1925  

drawing with washes 

20 1/4 x 15" image 

pencil signed, in image, lower right 

 

 

 

vellum 

 

 

13534 

$2,000.00 

Adolphine Sutro Fullerton painted this depiction of the famous Roman Catholic church around 1925. Situated in San Francisco's famed North Beach, it became known as "la cattedrale italiana dell'Ovest"--the Italian cathedral of the West. In the early 1900s with the wave of Italian immigrants who settled there. Fullerton, the daughter of Adolph Sutro who owned the Cliff House and Sutro Baths, often depicted San Francisco landmarks in her work. By the end of the 1920s, the structure had earned notoriety for its appearance in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, and for its use as the stage of anti-Catholic targeting by anarchists, who used explosives to try to destroy the structure on five separate occasions between 1926-27. You can now find the church in the movies Dirty Harry, Deadpool, and What's Up, Doc?. Baseball legened Joe DeMaggio, a first generation San Francisco Italian, was married in the church, and his funeral was held there when he passed away in 1999.