5 May 2005: Your Father's Monkey

In my entry of December 16th, 2004, I published, as I occasionally do, a list of the interesting search strings that had recently brought web searchers to the site. One of those search strings was "monkey holding human skull statue." Underneath it in that entry, I added the following comment:

Whoa... I know that statue! Seriously. My dad owned a copy of it, and might still; it was on a bookshelf in the house I grew up in. It's a bronze statue of a monkey, scratching its head and examining a human skull that it's holding. The monkey is sitting atop a pile of books; the spine of one of the books says "Darwin" on it. Now I'm tempted to hunt around and see if I can find a copy of that statue myself...

 

Just last week, I got this response from a professor at the University of Wisconsin:

Let me know if you find your father’s monkey. I have one of my own, and I have been doing research on this piece (and its creator) for over two years.

Greetings,

Axel Schmetzke

http://library.uwsp.edu/aschmetz/Rheinhold's_Monkey/Rheinhold's_Monkey_Page.htm

 

As I wrote in my reply to Dr. Schmetzke, after looking at the various photos on his site, I'm fairly certain that my father's monkey was one of the "Marwal" imitations of the original Rheinhold piece:

Thanks, Doc! This journal gets me the coolest email sometimes.