SAN FRANCISCO—A famous painting has been removed from San Francisco’s Palace Hotel’s main bar and will be sold in an upcoming auction. Hotel officials have estimated the painting, Maxfield Parish Pied Piper, is worth between $3 million and $5 million.
The painting was selected as one of the city’s “legacy bars and restaurants” by the San Francisco Architectural Heritage measuring at 16 feet in length and six feet deep. After hanging in the hotel’s bar for over a century, officials stated the Pied Piper is being sold because “it is no longer practical for the hotel to display, an original work of this value and cultural significance, in a public area.”
The painting was removed from the bar on Friday, March 22 and will be sold as the centerpiece of the Christie auction house’s spring sale of important American paintings on May 23.
Parish painted the mural in 1909 specifically for the Palace Hotel which had reopened that year after the original hotel was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
By Ivetta Babadjanian
