Alfred Hitchcock

Neighborhoods: Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor

In the northwestern corner of the San Francisco is a patch of green and an art museum.

The museum is the Legion of Honor and I headed over on a rainy Friday to see the current exhibit: Manet & Morisot. I also love to look at the museum’s permanent collection.

The museum is a 15 minute drive from my Sunset Digs and being a member means I can visit the museum as many times as I want.

One of two lions framing (or guarding) the entrance to the Legion. I sketched the other lion.

Looking at the masters: Rodin, Van Gough, Picasso, Monet, and others always inspires me to sketch. What I love about looking at the real deal as opposed to a facsimile is that you can really see the hand of the creator on the canvas or board. This was very true of the expressionists as they lay paint on in heavy patches. Step a few feet back to see what emerges!

Field sketching with Sutro Tower in the background. This tower has a way of appearing in many of my San Francisco field sketches.

Vertigo and Gallery 6 (1958)

The Legion of Honor was used as a filming location in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo (1958).

It was featured twice, both the exterior and one of the museum’s galleries, Gallery 6.

Detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is on a case and he follows Madeleine (Kim Novak) to the Legion of Honor. She sits for hours looking at a portrait of a lady. Scottie finds out it is a portrait of a lady named Carlotta.

Looking into Gallery 6. James Stewart stood next to the column on the right and in the background Kim Novak sat on a bench toward the left wall.

While Gallery 6 still looks much the same as when filming took place here in 1957, the paintings on the wall were not here. The Carlotta portrait was painted for the film by John Ferren and removed once filming was completed. But what about the other paintings?

This view shows the wall in Gallery 6 where the portrait of Carlotta hung. Kim Novak sat on one of the benches that have not changed since 1957 although the paintings in the gallery have changed.

Now it was time for a painting goose chase and I didn’t have far to go.

In adjacent Gallery 7 I located two paintings that James Stewart stood in front of during the Gallery 6 scenes. Two pieces of San Franciscan cinema history!

This is French painter
Nicolas de Largillière’s Portrait of a Gentleman (1710).
The other painting seen behind James Stewart is by French painter Carle Vanloo and is titled Architecture (1753).

For my sketch of Galley 6 I sketched in a continuous-line technique to get the shape of the room and then lifted my pen to add details. So it’s continuous-ish.

Shadow of a Doubt: Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square

Alfred Hitchcock’s own favorite film was his 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton.

The noir thriller was filmed in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa. The city was picked by Hitchcock and his team as a quaint and peaceful small city in which to inject the Merry Widow Murderer (Cotton). The script was cowritten by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder in an attempt to capture the flavor of life in a small town.

Uncle Charlie is eventually foiled by his namesake Charlie (Wright) as she slowly realizes who he really is and meets his end on a pilot of a freight train (spoiler alert!).

Uncle Charlie first enters idyllic Santa Rosa at the stone Northwestern Pacific (NWP) Depot (1904). The depot looks very much the same as it did in 1943, as it has withstood various earthquakes that have destroyed many of it’s contemporary surrounding buildings.

As the train approaches the depot the exhaust from the locomotive is an ominous pitch black and as the train pulls past the camera, a shadow envelopes the platform. This was all planned by Hitchcock as a modern “something wicked this way comes”. The arrival of Uncle Charlie to Santa Rosa.

A pre-trip sketch of a frame from the film of Northwestern Pacific No. 142 pulling into Santa Rosa Depot.

I sketched the depot and platform from the approximate camera position when the northbound train first arrives. It was a frigid morning and my fingerless gloves came in handy.

Looking north along the platform towards the depot. This is approximately where Joseph Cotten detrains from the last passenger car.
Passenger service to Santa Rosa ceased in 1958. After 67 years, passenger service is alive and well at the Santa Rosa Depot with the SMART train providing service to Larkspur and north to Windsor.
Two SMART trains at the Santa Rosa Depot. The near train is a northbound, heading the same direction as NWR No. 142 at the beginning of the film. At one time the line went north, 230.3 miles, to Eureka, California.

Sketching Bodega to Bodega Bay and The Birds

I wanted to sketch the actual bay of Bodega Bay but I wanted to find the right perspective (is there really such a thing).

I settled on a pullout near Spud Point Marina looking north.

It was near this location where Rose Gaffney’s house was located. Gaffney was a local rancher who led the protest against PG & E when they wanted to build a nuclear power plant at nearby Bodega Head.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted to use this location as “Mitch’s House” in his new film “The Birds” (1963). Gaffney was not a movie goer and had no idea who Hitchcock was.

The crew built a set with other outbuildings around Gaffney’s house. The house burned down in the late 1960s and the area today bears little resemblance to when the film was filmed here in the early 60s.

One filming location that has not changed since 1963 is the Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega (not to be confused with Bodega Bay, which is eight miles away).

This was the location used for the school during the corvid attack in The Birds.

The schoolhouse was built in 1873 out of local redwood. At the time of filming the building was no longer used as a school and the structure was derelict. Since filming took place the school was used as a bed and breakfast but now it is a private residence.

I pulled up on the street that the children ran down as they were attacked by a murder of crows. In the film they are running towards the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay. With a little movie magic, camera angles, and matte paintings it appears that the schoolhouse and the Tides are in the same location. In reality, eight miles separate the two locations.

While the school looks much the same, redwoods have now grown up around the schoolhouse and I included them in my sketch.