In 1940 he won the commission for his most famous work, the "History of San Francisco", located in the Rincon Center in San Francisco, California. He competed with a number of other artists for the commission, including artist Richard Haines, first funded as a project of the Section of Painting and Sculpture. The mural is formally known as the "History of San Francisco" and is located in the lobby of Rincon Center, a building that once served as a United States post office and was known then as Rincon Annex. Refregier painted the mural with casein tempera on white gesso over plaster walls, in the social realism style. Work restarted after the war, in 1946, and took two years to complete at a cost of $26,000.