Bronze Hound's Art Collection: The Sentinel by Kirk St. Maur McReynolds (contemporary, b. 1949)

These bronzes came to me almost through a fluke. The first one popped up on eBay as an unfinished "raw" bronze awhile back. Since I have the ability to finish a bronze statue, I purchased it. In the listing for the one, however, I saw the seller had a bucketful of identical bronzes. I asked if he planned to sell those as well and told him in no uncertain terms that I would buy all of them to finish myself. Though the seller had plans to melt them down to make his own art (bronze depictions of the penis bones of raccoons, a moonshiners' thing), he agreed to sell them to me in bulk lots. That led to me buying the rest of them, for a total of six identical bronzes, some in better condition than others. All of them need work and are missing their bows and arrows, which I'll have to cast. That's also not a problem for me.

Kirk St. Maur is a retired sculptor from Quincy, Illinois with a handful of monuments to his credit. He studied sociology and anthropology at Carlton College, going on to graduate studies at the University of Colorado. After teaching for ten years at a Jesuit university and a detour into studying architecture, Mr. St. Maur decided to focus on the human figure and left to study art in Italy. Monument commissions and sales of gallery bronzes kept him afloat for many years but was not paying enough to raise a family, so he left sculpting behind to focus on his farm and family.

"The Sentinel" was sculpted to replace a statue in Point Richmond, California that had been knocked over and broken by a truck then scrapped during a metals drive during WWII. The old statue, a cast iron catalogue piece from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, their #53 Indian Chief, has many other copies extant and has had many different names appended to it. Unveiled in 1984, the Point Richmond copy of "The Sentinel" is made of bronze colored fiberglass. St. Maur had an identical monument cast of fiberglass and another of solid bronze as well as a monumental sized bronze copy without the cape (my personal favorite). He also had no more than ten small, maquette sized copies cast, of which I know two were fully finished. I have six unfinished copies of the maquette and that may represent the balance of copies cast.

It is my plan to finish all six of my copies. One or two will need major surgery due to poor casting and mold slippage. I'm ready for that task. I'm excited to take it on. I hope to be finished with the job by the end of next spring.

Enjoy!