A 150-pound statue was found buried in a San Francisco backyard. Its origin is a mystery

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Set us as preferred One day in late May, Greg Gatwood was doing what he does best as a design landscaper — grading his backyard and leveling the soil.Gatwood hoped to put in a new fence and was raking some rocks and dirt to make the yard smoother.As the 65-year-old was using a pickax to remove what he thought was a rectangular piece of concrete, the object moved.Puzzled, Gatwood lifted the big block and flipped it over to reveal it was a very large bust of a woman, weighing about 150 pounds.“I’ve always thought every yard deserves a nice piece of garden art,” Gatwood told The Times.

“This will be displayed in a special way in our yard.I hope to share the photos of our yard when it’s completed with the statue beautifully placed.” His wife, Judy Gittelsohn, 68, was sitting inside their San Francisco home in Russian Hill working when she noticed her husband’s discovery.Gittelsohn, a painter who attended the now-shuttered San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s, located across the street from the couple’s home, reached out to about 50 scholars and art experts about the origins of the bust.She learned that the bust likely could have belonged to one of the students of Ralph Stackpole, a sculptor who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (then known as the California School of Fine Arts.) Stackpole joined the faculty in 1918 and taught there until 1941.“The thrilling part is the investigation and how many people are so excited about this,” Gittelsohn said.

“You find a treasure and it’s just like the world is sort of opening in this way.We knew Ralph Stackpole’s canon of work but we didn’t know how many people he taught and how many people’s lives he’s touched.

I’m a painter and it’s a fantastic big book opening.”The bust is about 22 inches wide, 18 inches high and 10 inches deep, accordi...