Elisabet Ney

After the Munich academy, Ney studied in Berlin under Christian Daniel Rauch and through him met the city's artistic and intellectual elite; her early portraits included Jacob Grimm and Alexander von Humboldt. She went on to portray Arthur Schopenhauer, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Otto von Bismarck. She married Edmund Montgomery on Madeira on November 7, 1863. Governor Oran M. Roberts's invitation to Austin in the 1880s drew her back to sculpture. Her Lady Macbeth, one of her few ideal pieces, is in the Smithsonian, and in 1911 supporters founded the Texas Fine Arts Association in her honor.

What the plaque says

Elisabet Ney (Jan. 26, 1833 - June 29, 1907) World-renowned sculptor; lived 35 years in Texas, where she executed works of many noted citizens. Born in Muenster, Westphalia, Germany, Elisabet grew up beautiful, talented, and self-willed. At 19 she began to study at the Academy of Arts, Munich, where her skill and charm brought many admirers, and her strong opinions made some think her eccentric. Before she was 30, Elisabet had produced statues of German royalty and many European statesmen. In 1863 she married Dr. Edmund Montgomery, whom she had met as a young medical student from Scotland. In 1870 they moved to the United States and in 1872, to Texas, which they liked for its vastness and its high regard for freedom. They purchased the famous Liendo Plantation in present Waller County and there reared two sons, only one of whom lived to adulthood. In 1892 Elisabet built this studio, "Formosa," in which to execute statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston for the Texas exhibit at the 1893 World Fair. The statues now stand in the State Capitol. Here she also did a recumbent statue of military leader Albert Sidney Johnston, which lies over his grave at the State Cemetery in Austin. Elisabet Ney and Dr. Montgomery are both buried at Liendo. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.4 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• Harry Ransom Center — 1.8 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 2.0 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Capitol — 2.3 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.

More markers nearby

• Texas Confederate Woman's Home — 0.6 mi
• John Elbridge Hines — 1.0 mi
• Jane Yelvington McCallum — 1.0 mi
• Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary — 1.2 mi