Elisabet Ney: Shaping a Career

Elisabet Ney: Shaping a Career

1 People in Hempstead, Texas, weren't sure what to think about their neighbor Elisabet Ney. She seemed cool and aloof rather than warm and friendly. She was known to sleep outside on a hammock, and she did not eat meat. She often wore long, flowing robes and, sometimes, men's trousers, instead of proper dresses. She thought it foolish for women to be concerned about housework. "I make lemonade in a glass and then rinse it, and my housework is done for the day," Ney once declared. Although she was married, she referred to herself as "Miss Ney."

2 Elisabet Ney was born in Westphalia, a region in Germany, in 1833. Her father was a master stonecutter, and from him young Elisabet learned how to work with marble, a skill she would put to good use as an artist. Ney later studied drawing and sculpture and became the first woman to be admitted to the respected Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Later, in Berlin, she studied sculpture with Christian Daniel Rauch, a leading artist of the mid-nineteenth century.

3 Perhaps at this point, you're thinking that Elisabet Ney seems admirable, if a bit odd. But Ney was stepping out of bounds in the 1800s, and not everyone admired her free-spirited nature. Today, no one raises an eyebrow if a woman wants to establish a career as an artist. In Ney's time, however, women were not expected to have careers outside the home.

4 Nevertheless, Ney continued to forge her career, despite the reaction of others. By the 1850s, she was traveling throughout Europe, creating sculptures of royalty, politicians, and cultural leaders.

5 Ney and her husband, a Scottish physician, left Germany for the United States when war broke out between the German states and France in 1870. They lived for a while in Georgia and then settled on a cotton plantation they bought near Hempstead, Texas. Standing on the veranda of her new home, Ney is said to have spread her arms and proclaimed, "Here I will live, and here I will die!" She abandoned her artistic career to raise her surviving son, Lorne. The couple's older son, Arthur, had died shortly before the age of two.

6 Then, in the 1880s, Ney decided to resume her art career. She began sculpting busts and statues of distinguished Texans. After spending time in Austin, she opened a studio there, naming it Formosa, which is Portuguese for "beautiful." Formosa soon became a place where notable Texan philotechnics gathered to discuss art, politics, and other topics of the day. By that time, Ney was an avid supporter of the arts and artists in her adopted state.

7 Ney became almost as distinguished as the subjects of her artworks. When she was nearly sixty years old, she received a commission to create life-size statues of Texas heroes Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin for the Texas Exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Marble copies of these statues now stand in the south foyer of the Texas State Capitol. Copies of the artworks are also displayed in the United States Capitol.

8 Among Ney's last works is a statue of Lady Macbeth, a powerful character in the Shakespeare play Macbeth. The statue is on view in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

9 Elisabet Ney died in 1907. Her studio in Austin is now a public museum that showcases many of Ney's works and provides educational programs, exhibitions, and other offerings. A few years after the artist's death, several friends and admirers of Elisabet Ney founded the Texas Fine Arts Association in her honor to promote art throughout Texas.