We offer a guide to the sculptures of Beniamino Bufano in San Francisco. Pictured is his “Peace” sculpture on Brotherhood Way.

Prolific sculptor during the Great Depression created huge works found across city

At the far back corner of the Stanford Court Hotel grounds sat a stone statue of a penguin, lonely as lonely can be for 40 years at least.

Nobody knows how it got there, and nobody knew it was there until an early Saturday morning in July when it was lifted off its perch behind a stone wall by crane, to the amazement of passengers on the Powell Street cable car line. Hauled into the light, the penguin was revealed to be guarding her two chicks, the hallmark of Beniamino “Bene” (Benny) Bufano, the 5-foot-tall patron saint of San Francisco sculptors.

The resurrection of a 3-ton, 10-foot-tall sculpture doesn’t happen every day, particularly one by the beloved Bufano. So it inspired the first-ever Chronicle census of Bufano’s work.

A prolific employee of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, Bufano believed that public art should be “big enough to belong to everybody.” As a result, there is more tonnage in the corpulent bears and penguins and

seals, along with calming spiritual totems that Bufano favored, than by any other artist whose work can be seen by driving around the city.

There are 16 of them in the Civic Art Collection, scattered to the four corners of the city, and those are just the city-owned Bufanos.

They are also in churches, hospitals, colleges and public housing projects — places where the need for spiritual uplift is greatest. Outside San Francisco, you’ll find a Bufano bear guarding the Ross

“He was a tiny man who conceived of his art in gargantuan proportions.” Mary Serventi Steiner, curator at the Museo Italo Americano

Town Hall and another one at Bullis Elementary School in Los Altos Hills. A herd of Bufano animals roam the Hillsdale Shopping Center.

“He was a tiny man who conceived of his art in gargantuan proportions,” says Mary Serventi Steiner, curator at the Museo Italo Americano, which owns 46 Bufano pieces including sketches. “He couldn’t be dissuaded from making very large public art.”

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2005

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Crews prepare to remove a penguin sculpture by Beniamino Bufano by crane from the grounds of the Stanford Court Hotel for restoration and reinstallation at the main entrance to the hotel.

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle A 3-ton, 10-foot-tall Bufano penguin sculpture is lifted by crane from its perch on the Stanford Court Hotel grounds for restoration.