Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Laguna Honda Hospital
Forest Hill / Twin Peaks

This graceful painted cast stone statue of Florence Nightingale titled Lady of the Lamp is by David Edstrom and was done in 1937.  The project was part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Artists Program.

The statue sat in the Court of the Seven Seas during the Golden Gate International Exhibition.  The Lady of the Lamp refers to a Longfellow poem.

(Peter) David Edstrom (1873-1938) was an immigrant from Vetlanda, Jönköping County, Sweden. In 1880, he immigrated to the United States with his parents, John Peter Edstrom and Charlotte Gustavson Edstrom. Edstrom lived in Ottumwa, Iowa from 1882 to 1894, which he embraced as his hometown and where he became aware of his artistic skills. (Des Moines Register; May 20, 2007). He returned to Sweden after a hobo’s journey started in a freight train car on July 29, 1894 and ended (after a wage earner’s trip across the Atlantic) in Stockholm where he supported himself during his studies at the Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology and Royal Swedish Academy of Arts.

In 1900, Edstrom moved to Florence where he attended the Academia of Fine Arts. He returned to the United States in 1915.  Around 1920, he relocated in Los Angeles, where he was one of the organizers of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Laguna Honda Hospital has a very long history in San Francisco that can be read here.  The building that Florence Nightingale sits in front of  began construction in the 1920’s when Mayor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph turned over the first spade of earth for the Spanish Revival-style buildings that would become Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center

Those buildings were opened in 1926 and continued to grow in the decades that followed with the addition of new “finger wings,” the long, Florence Nightingale-style open wards that were customary at the time.

There is a plaque on the side of the sculpture pedestal that reads:

In memory of Florence Nightingale, “The Founder of Professional Nursing”
Designed and created by the late David Edstrom. Dedicated National Hospital Day, May 12, 1939. Golden Gate International Exposition under the auspices of Northern California Federal Artist Project, Works Progress Administartion. City and County of San Francisco. Association of Western Hospitals, Association of California Hospitals, Western Conference, Catholic Hospital Association, California State Nurses Association.

The Longfellow Poem:

SANTA FILOMENA
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
November 1857

Whene’er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,
To higher levels rise.

The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares
Out of all meaner cares.

Honor to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp,—

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened, and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone was spent.

On England’s annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Filomena bore.