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<\/p>\nAfter discovering a large limestone bust on their San Francisco property in May, Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn have spent the past few months trying to unravel its backstory<\/p>\n
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Sarah Kuta<\/a><\/p>\n | Daily Correspondent<\/p>\n August 17, 2026 10:33 a.m.<\/p>\n The sculpture weighs an estimated 150 pounds. Greg Gatwood was working in his San Francisco backyard this May when his shovel struck something hard beneath the dirt. Gatwood, a 65-year-old landscape contractor, figured that he\u2019d hit an old fence post footing.<\/p>\n Instead, after freeing the object with a pickax, Gatwood found himself face to face with a bust of a woman. Made of limestone, the hefty piece consisted of a woman\u2019s head and neck rising from a rectangular base. It was substantial, weighing roughly 150 pounds and measuring about 22 inches wide, 18 inches high and 10 inches deep.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exciting,\u201d Gatwood tells NBC Bay Area<\/a>\u2019s Raj Mathai. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the most exciting thing I\u2019ve ever dug up in a yard, and I\u2019ve dug up a lot of things over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n Gatwood showed the mysterious masterpiece to his partner, Judy Gittelsohn<\/a>, who is a professional painter. Over the past few months, Gatwood and Gittelsohn have made it their mission to figure out who carved the bust\u2014and how it ended up in their backyard.<\/p>\n \u201cI have spoken to close to 50 people, and nobody knows anything about it,\u201d Gittelsohn tells the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>\u2019s Sam Whiting. \u201cIt was done by someone with a sophisticated skill level. It was not created by a hobbyist.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts caution that definitively identifying the sculpture\u2019s creator will be challenging, if not impossible, without a signature or some sort of historical documentation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a treasure that they just found,\u201d Ken Middlebrook, curator of collections at the nonprofit History San Jose<\/a>\u00a0organization, tells KTVU<\/a>\u2019s Jesse Gary. \u201cThe difficulty will be trying to identify who made it.\u201d<\/p>\n Mystery sculpture found in San Francisco backyard | KTVU<\/p>\n Though its origins remain decidedly murky, Gittelsohn has a strong hunch about the sculpture\u2019s maker: She\u00a0thinks it may be linked to Ralph Stackpole<\/a> or one of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.<\/p>\n Stackpole was an American sculptor and muralist who lived and worked in San Francisco during the first half of the 20th century. He moved to the city in 1901\u00a0and left his mark on it over the next several decades. In the 1930s, the artist created one of the frescoes<\/a> inside Coit Tower<\/a> as part of the Public Works of Art Project<\/a>, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal<\/a> reform programs during the Great Depression. Stackpole also carved<\/a> the two towering Art Deco figures that still guard the entrance of the historic Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building in San Francisco. Additionally, he made pieces for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition<\/a> and the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition<\/a>, which was held on the city\u2019s artificial Treasure Island<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to creating his own art, Stackpole spent nearly two decades teaching sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute. The institute\u00a0closed in 2022<\/a>, but the building that housed its sculpture department sits across the street from Gittelsohn and Gatwood\u2019s home in the city\u2019s Russian Hill neighborhood. Before the couple\u2019s two-story house was built in 1948, the property was an empty lot\u2014and Gittelsohn\u00a0suspects that Stackpole or one of his pupils might have buried the sculpture there.<\/p>\n \u201cHis disciples, his students, created this similar look of the flattened nose and broad face,\u201d she tells NBC Bay Area.<\/p>\n Did you know? Ralph Stackpole, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo<\/p>\n
Historian Anne Schnoebelen<\/a>, vice president of the board of directors at the Treasure Island Museum<\/a> in San Francisco, says that it\u2019s possible the piece was created by either Stackpole or Adaline Kent<\/a> or Helen Phillips<\/a>, two of his students who lived nearby.<\/p>\n She speculates that the bust might have been featured at the Golden Gate International Exposition, in an area called the Court of Pacifica<\/a>. In addition to Stackpole\u2019s 80-foot-tall statue of the mythical goddess Pacifica<\/a>, the site featured 20 Pacific Unity sculptures, including 12 smaller works arranged on the tiers of a three-tier fountain and 8 larger sculptures on the surrounding plaza.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/just_found_head_close_up_at_an_angle.jpeg\")
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\n Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn<\/p>\n![\"Mystery](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/maxresdefault.jpg\")
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\n\tStackpole\u00a0studied art in San Francisco as a teenager. But after the earthquake of 1906<\/a>, he moved to Paris to attend the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts<\/a>, where he met and befriended Mexican muralist Diego Rivera<\/a>.
\n\tAfter Stackpole moved back to the Bay Area, he helped\u00a0Rivera land a commission to create a mural at the Pacific Stock Exchange building, later renamed the City Club of San Francisco. Rivera and his wife<\/a>, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo<\/a>, spent six months living<\/a> in Stackpole\u2019s studio in the early 1930s.
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