Elisabet Ney: The Sculptor Who Shocked Austin

Elisabet Ney was one of the most celebrated sculptors in Europe before she ever set foot in Texas. Born in Prussia in eighteen thirty-three, she had made portrait busts of Otto von Bismarck, Arthur Schopenhauer, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria. Then she walked away from all of it, moved to Texas, and spent two decades in relative obscurity on a plantation in Hempstead.

In eighteen eighty-two she came to Austin, designed her own studio in Hyde Park, and named it Formosa. She completed it in eighteen ninety-three and kept working there until her death in nineteen oh seven. At Formosa she sculpted marble statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston for the Texas exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three, and later for the state capitol. Austin society found her eccentric and shocking, a woman who kept her own name after marriage and refused most social conventions. When she died, her friends opened Formosa as one of Texas's first public fine art museums. It still stands in Hyde Park, the oldest art museum in Austin.