Aug. 12 (UPI) — A San Francisco man doing landscaping work in his yard unearthed a 150-pound stone statue that might have ties to a famous local artist.
Greg Gatwood said he was working in his yard in the Russian Hill neighborhood when he came across a stone slab buried under the grass.
“I was doing a little grading and I came across what I thought was a piece of concrete, rectangular, and I thought, I’ll just pop it out and throw it to the side,” Gatwood told KTVU-TV.
Gatwood dug out the heavy slab and turned it over, revealing a sculpture with an intricately detailed face carved into the stone.
Judy Gittelsohn, an artist and Gatwood’s partner, consulted with other artists and began to suspect the 2-foot-wide sculpture might be the work of Ralph Stackpole, a prominent San Francisco artist who died in 1973.
Stackpole’s famous works include a statue in front of San Francisco’s old Stock Exchange. He also taught at the California School of Fine Arts, which is now the San Francisco Art Institute. The school’s sculpture department was located near Gatwood and Gittelsohn’s home.
Bruce Marwick, a member of the Sacramento Art Deco Society, said determining the artist behind the sculpture would be a difficult endeavor.
“It’s going out on a limb to call this a Ralph Stackpole piece,” Marwick told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s a wonderfully interesting piece, but the hardest thing to do in art evaluation is to authenticate a piece without a signature or historical documentation.”
Gittelsohn said the Stackpole influence on the sculpture seems clear, but she agreed it might be unlikely to be the artist’s work.
“Probably it was one of his students,” she said.
Gittelsohn said she is continuing to attempt to solve the art history mystery, and in the meantime the sculpture will form the centerpiece of the couple’s newly-renovated garden.